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PROSE FANCIES 

SECOND SERIES 



PROSE FANCIES 



SECOND SERIES 



RICHARD LeGALLIENNE 




HERBERT S. STONE & CO., CHICAGO 

JOHN LANE, LONDON 

MDCCCXCVII 



COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY 
HERBERTS. STONE & CO. 



aift 

W. L. Shoemaker 
J S '06 



FOURTH IMPRESSION 



TO MAGGIE LE GALLIENNE, WITH 
LOVE 



Poor are the gifts of the poet 
Nothing but words! 
The gifts of ki?igs are goldy 
Silver and flocks and herds. 
Garments of strange soft silky 
Feathers of wonderful birds. 
Jewels and precious stones. 
And horses white as the milk — 
These are the gifts of Kings; 
But the gifts that the poet brings 
Are nothing but words. 

Forty Thousand words ! 
Take them — a gift of flies J 
Words that should have been birds. 
Words that should have been flowers. 
Words that should have been stars. 
In the eternal skies. 
Forty thousand words / 
Forty thousand tears — 
All out of two sad eyes. 



PROS E FAN C I E S — I 

A SEVENTH STORY 
HEAVEN. 



AT one end of the city that I love there 
. is a tall dingy pile of offices that has 
evidently seen more prosperous for- 
tunes. It is not the aristocratic end. It is 
remote from the lordly street of the fine 
shops of the fair women, where in the sum- 
mer afternoons the gay bank clerks parade 
arm-in-arm in the wake of the tempestuous 
petticoat. It lies aside from the great ex- 
chang*^ which looks like a scene from 
Romeo a7id 'Juliet in the moonlight, from 
the town hall from whose clocked and 
gilded cupola ring sweet chimes at mid- 
night, and whence, throned above the 
city, a golden Britannia, in the sight of all 
men, is seen visibly ruling the waves — 
while in the square below the death of 
Nelson is played all day in stone, with a 
frieze of his noble words about the pedes- 
tal. England expects ! What an influ- 



6 PROSE FANCIES 

ence that stirring challenge has yet upon 
the hearts of men may be seen by any one 
who will study the faces of the busy im- 
aginative cotton brokers, who, in the 
thronged and humming mornings, sell what 
they have never seen to a customer they 
will never see. 

In fact, the end I mean is just the 
very opposite end to that. It is the end 
where the cotton that everybody sells and 
nobody buys is seen, piled in great white 
stacks, or swinging in the air from the 
necks of mighty cranes, cranes that could 
nip up an elephant with as little ado, and 
set him down on the wharf, with a box on 
his ugly ears for his cowardly trumpeting. 
It is the end that smells of tar, the domain 
of the harbour-masters, where the sailor 
finds a ' home,' — not too sweet, and where 
the wild sea is tamed in a maze of gran- 
ite squares and basins, the end where 
the riggings and buildings rise side by side, 
and a clerk might swing himself out upon 
the yards from his top floor desk. Here is 
the custom-house, and the conversation 
that shines is full of freightage and dock 
dues ; here are the shops that sell nothing 



PROSE FANCIES 7 

but oilskins, sextants and parrots, and 
here the taverns do a mighty trade in rum. 

It was in this quarter, for a brief sweet 
time, that Love and Beauty made their 
strange home, as though a pair of halcy- 
ons should choose to nest in the masthead 
of a cattleship. Love and Beauty chose 
this quarter, as alas. Love and Beauty 
must choose so many things — for its 
cheapness. Love and Beauty were poor, 
and office rents in this quarter were ex- 
ceptionally low. But what should Love 
and Beauty do with an office? Love was 
a poor poet in need of a room for his bed 
and his rhymes, and Beauty was a little 
blue-eyed girl who loved him. 

It was a shabby, forbidding place, 
gloomy and comfortless as a warehouse on 
the banks of Styx. No one but Love and 
Beauty would have dared to choose it 
for their home. But Love and Beauty 
have a great confidence in themselves — a 
confidence curiously supported by history 
— and they never had a moment's doubt 
that this place was as good as another for 
an earthly Paradise. So Love signed an 
agreement for one great room at the very 



8 PROSE FANCIES 

top, the very masthead of the building, and 
Beauty made it pretty with muslin curtains, 
flowers, and dainty makeshifts of furniture, 
but chiefly with the light of her own heav- 
enly face. A stroke of luck coming one 
day to the poet, the lovers, with that ex- 
travagance which the poor alone have the 
courage to enjoy, procured a piano on the 
kind-hearted hire-purchase system, a system 
specially conceived for lovers. Then, in- 
deed, for many a wonderful night that 
room was not only on the seventh floor, 
but in the seventh heaven; and as Beauty 
would sit at the piano, with her long hair 
flying loose, and her soul like a whirl of 
starlight about her brows, a stranger peer- 
ing in across the soft lamplight, seeing her 
face, hearing her voice, would deem that 
the long climb, flight after flight of dreary 
stair, had been appropriately rewarded by 
a glimpse of Heaven. 

Certainly it must have seemed a strange 
contrast from the life about and below it. 
The foot of that infernal stair plunged in 
the warm rum-and-thick-twist atmosphere 
of a sailor*s tavern — and 'The Jolly Ship- 
of entertainment by 



PROSE FANCIES 9 

no means to be despised. Often have I 
sat there with the poet, drinking the whisky 
from which Scotland takes its name, among 
wondering sea-boots and sou'-westers, who 
could make nothing of that wild hair and 
that still wilder talk. 

From the kingdom of rum and tar, you 
mounted into a zone of commission agents 
and ship-brokers, a chill, unoccupied region, 
in which every small office bore the names 
of half-a-dozen different firms, and yet 
somehow could not contrive to look busy. 
Finally came an airy echoing landing, a 
region of empty rooms, which the land- 
lords in vain recommended as studios to a 
city that loved not art. Here dwelt the 
keeper and his kind-hearted little wife, and 
no one besides save Love and Beauty. 
There was thus a feeling of rarefaction in 
the atmosphere, as though at this height it 
was only the Alpine flora of humanity that 
could find root and breathing. But once 
along the bare passage and through a cer- 
tain door, and what a sudden translation it 
was into a gracious world of books and 
flowers and the peace they always bring. 

Once upon a time, in that enchanted 



10 PROSE FANCIES 

past where dwell all the dreams we love 
best, precisely, with loving punctuality, at 
five in the afternoon, a pretty girlish figure, 
like Persephone escaping from the shades, 
stole through the rough sailors at the foot 
of that sordid Jacob's ladder and made her 
way to the little Heaven at the top. 

I shall not describe her, for the good 
reason that I cannot. Leonardo, ever 
curious of the beauty that was most 
strangely exquisite, once in an inspired 
hour painted such a face, a face wrought 
of the porcelain of earth with the art of 
Heaven. But, whoever should paint it, 
God certainly made it — must have been 
the comment of any one who caught a 
glimpse of that little figure vanishing 
heavenwards up that stair, like an Assump- 
tion of Era Angelico's — that is any one 
interested in art and angels. 

She had not long to wait outside the 
door she sought, for the poet, who had 
listened all day for the sound, had ears for 
the whisper of her skirts as she came down 
the corridor, and before she had time to 
knock had already folded her in his arms. 
The two babes in that thieves' wood of 



PROSE FANCIES ii 

commission agents and ship brokers stood 
silent together for a moment, in the deep 
security of a kiss such as the richest mil- 
lionaire could never buy — and then they 
fell to comparing notes of their day's 
work. The poet had had one of his rare 
good days. He had made no money, his 
post had been even more disappointing 
than usual, — but he had written a poem, 
the best he had ever written, he said, as he 
always said of his last new thing. He had 
been burning to read it to somebody all 
afternoon — had with difficulty refrained 
from reading it to the loquacious little 
keeper's wife as she brought him some 
coals — so it was not to be expected that 
he should wait a minute before reading it 
to her whom indeed it strove to celebrate. 
With arms round each other's necks, they 
bent over the table, littered with the new- 
born poem, all blots and dashes like the 
first draft of a composer's score, and the 
poet, deftly picking his way among the 
erasures and interlineations, read aloud the 
beautiful words — with a full sense of 
their beauty ! — to ears that deemed them 
more beautiful even than they were. 



12 PROSE FANCIES 

The owners of this now valuable copy- 
right allow me to irradiate my prose with 
three of the verses. 

'Ah ! what,' half chanted, half crooned 
the poet — 

* Ah ! what a garden is your hair ! — 
Such treasure as the kings of old, 
In coffers of the beaten gold, 
Laid up on earth — and left it there.' 

So tender a reference to hair whose 
beauty others beside the poet had loved 
must needs make a tender interruption — 
the only kind of interruption the poet 
could have forgiven — and 'Who,' he 
continued — 

* Who was the artist of your mouth ? 
What master out of old Japan. 
Wrought it so dangerous to man . . .' 

And here it was but natural that laugh- 
ter and kisses should once more interrupt — 

* Those strange blue jewels of your eyes. 
Painting the lily of your face, 
What goldsmith set them in their place — 
Forget-me-nots of Paradise ? 

' And that blest river of your voice. 
Whose merry silver stirs the rest 
Of watcr-lilie;; in your breast . . .' 



PROSE FANCIES 13 

At last, in spite of more interruptions, 
the poem came to an end — whereupon, 
of course, the poet immediately read it 
through once more from the beginning, its 
personal and emotional elements, he felt, 
having been done more justice on a first 
reading than its artistic excellencies. 

' Why, darling, it is splendid,* was his 
little sweetheart's comment ; ' you know 
how happy it makes me to think it was 
written for me, don't you ?' And she took 
his hands and looked up at him with eyes 
like the morning sky. 

Romance in poetry is almost exclu- 
sively associated with very refined ethereal 
matters, stars and flowers and such like — 
happily, in actual life it is often associated 
with much humbler objects. Lovers, like 
children, can make their paradises out of 
the quaintest materials. Indeed, our para- 
dises, if we only knew, are always cheap 
enough ; it is our hells that are so expen- 
sive. Now these lovers — like, if I mis- 
take not, many other true lovers before 
and since — when they were particularly 
happy, when some special piece of good 
luck had befallen them could think of no 



14 PROSE FANCIES 

better paradise than a little dinner together 
in their seventh-story heaven. 'Ah ! wil- 
derness were Paradise enow ! ' 

To-night was obviously such an occa- 
sion. But, alas ! where was the money to 
come from ? They didn't need much — 
for it is wonderful how happy you can be 
on five shillings, if you only know how. 
At the same time it is difficult to be happy 
on ninepence — which was the entire for- 
tune of the lovers at the moment. Beauty 
laughingly suggested that her celebrated 
hair might prove worth the price of their 
dinner. The poet thought a pawnbroker 
might surely be found to advance ten shil- 
lings on his poem — the original MS. too 
— else had they nothing to pawn, save a 
few gold and silver dreams which they 
couldn't spare. What was to be done ? 
Sell some books, of course ! It made 
them shudder to think how many poets 
they had eaten in this fashion. It was 
sheer cannibalism — but what was to be 
done ! Their slender stock of books had 
been reduced entirely to poetry. If there 
had only been a philosopher or a modern 
novelist, the sacrifice wouldn't have seemed 



PROSE FANCIES 15 

so unnatural. And then Beauty's eyes 
fell upon a very fat informing-looking 
volume on the poet's desk. 

' Would n't this do ? ' she said. 

' Why, of course ! ' he exclaimed ; ' the 
very thing. A new history of socialism 
just sent me for review. Hang the review ; 
we want our dinner, do n't we, little one ? 
And then I 've read the preface, and looked 
through the index — quite enough to make 
a column of, with a plentiful supply of 
general principles thrown in ! Why, of 
course, there 's our dinner for certain, dull 
and indigestible as it looks. It 's worth 
fifty minor poets at old Moser's. Come 
along. . . .' 

So off went the happy pair — ah ! how 
much happier was Beauty than ever so 
many fine ladies one knows who have 
only, so to say, to rub their wedding rings 
for a banquet to rise out of the ground, 
with the most distinguished guests around 
the table, champagne of the best, and con- 
versation of the worst. 

Old Moser found histories of socialism 
profitable, more profitable perhaps than 
socialism, and he actually gave five-and- 



i6 PROSE FANCIES 

sixpence for the volume. With the nine- 
pence already in their pockets, you will 
see that they were now possessors of quite 
a small fortune. Six-and-threepence ! It 
would n't pay for one's lunch nowadays. 
Ah ! but that is because the poor alone 
know the art of dining. 

You need n't wish to be happier and 
merrier than those two lovers, as they 
gaily hastened to that bright and cosy 
corner of the town where those lovely 
ham-and-beef shops make glad the faces of 
the passers-by. O those hams with their 
honest shining faces, polished like mahog- 
any — and the man inside so happy all 
day slicing them with those wonderful 
long knives (v/hich, of course, the superior 
class of reader has never seen) worn away 
to a veritable thread, a mere wire, but keen 
as Excalibur. Beauty used to calculate 
in her quaint way how much steel was 
worn away with each pound of ham, and 
how much therefore went to the sandwich. 
And what an artist was the carver ! What 
a true eye, what a iirm, flexible wrist, 
never a shaving of fat too much — he was 
too great an artist for that. Then there 



PROSE FANCIES 17 

were those dear little cream cheeses and 
those little brown jugs of yellow cream, 
come all the way from Devonshire — you 
could hear the cows lowing across the rich 
pasture, and hear the milkmaids singing 
and the milk whizzing into the pail, as 
you looked at them. 

And then those perfectly lovely sau- 
sages — I beg the reader's pardon ! I 
forgot that the very mention of the word 
smacks of vulgarity. Yet, all the same, I 
venture to think that a secret taste for 
sausages among the upper classes is more 
widespread than we have any idea of. I 
confess that Beauty and her poet were at 
first ashamed of admitting their vulgar 
frailty to each other. They needed to 
know each other very well first. Yet 
there is nothing, when once confessed, 
that brings two people so close as — a 
taste for sausages. 

' You darling ! ' exclaimed Beauty, with 
something like tears in her voice, when 
her poet first admitted this touch of na- 
ture — and then next moment they were 
in fits of laughter that a common taste for 
a very ' low ' food should bring tears to 



i8 PROSE FANCIES 

their eyes ! But such are the vagaries of 
love — as you will know, if you know 
anything about it — ' vulgar,' no doubt, 
though only the vulgar would so describe 
them ; for it is only vulgarity that is 
always ' refined.' 

Then there was the florist's to visit. 
What beautiful trades some people ply ! 
To sell flowers is surely like dealing in 
fairies. Beautiful must grow the hands 
that wire them, and sweet the flower-girl's 
every thought ! 

There remained but the wine mer- 
chant's, or, had we not better say at once, 
the grocer's, for our lovers could afford no 
rarer vintages than Tintara or the golden 
burgundy of Australia ; and it is wonderful 
to think what a sense of festivity one of 
those portly colonial flagons lent to their lit- 
tle dining-table. Sometimes, I may confide, 
when they wanted to feel very dissipated, 
and were very rich, they would allow them- 
selves a small bottle of Benedictine — 
and you should have seen Beauty's eyes 
as she luxuriantly sipped at her green little 
liqueur glass ; for, like most innocent peo- 
ple, she enjoyed to the full the delight of 



PROSE FANCIES 19 

feeling occasionally wicked. However, 
these were rare occasions, and this night 
was not one of them. 

Half a pound of black grapes com- 
pleted their shopping, and then, with 
their arms full of their purchases, they 
made their way home again, the two 
happiest people in what is, after all, a 
not unhappy world. 

Then came the cooking and the laying 
of the table. For all her Leonardo face. 
Beauty was a great cook — like all good 
women, she was as earthly in some respects 
as she was heavenly in others, which 1 
hold to be a wise combination — and, in- 
deed, both were excellent cooks ; and the 
poet was unrivalled at 'washing up,' which, 
I may say, is the only skeleton at these 
Bohemian feasts. 

You should have seen the gusto with 
which Beauty pricked those sausages — I 
had better explain to the un-Bohemian 
reader that to attempt to cook a sausage 
without first pricking it vigorously with a 
fork, to allow for the expansion of its 
juicy gases, is like trying to smoke a cigar 
without first cutting off the end — and O! 



20 PROSE FANCIES 

to hear again their merry song as they 
writhed in torment in the hissing pan, like 
Christian martyrs raising hymns of praise 
from the very core of Smithfield fires. 

Meanwhile, the poet would be surpass- 
ing himself in the setting out of the little 
table, cutting up the bread reverently as 
though it were for an altar — as indeed 
it was — studying the effect of the dish 
of tomatoes, now at this corner, now at 
that, arranging the flowers with much more 
care than he arranged the adjectives in 
his sonnets, and making ever so sumptu- 
ous an effect with that half a pound of 
grapes. 

And then at last the little feast would 
begin, with a long grace of eyes meeting 
and hands clasping ; true eyes that said 
' how good it is to behold you, to be 
awake together in this dream of life \ true 
hands that said ' I will hold you fast for- 
ever — not death even shall pluck you 
from my hand, shall loose this bond of 
you and me;' true eyes, true hands, that 
had immortal meanings far beyond the 
speech of mortal words. 

And it had all come out of that dull his- 



PROSE FANCIES 21 

tory of socialism, and had cost little more 
than a crov/n ! What lovely things can be 
made out of money ! Strange to think that a 
little silver coin of no possible use or beauty 
in itself can be exchanged for so much 
tangible beautiful pleasure. A piece of 
money is like a piece of opium, for in it 
lie locked up the most wonderful dreams 
— if you have only the brains and hearts 
to dream them. 

When at last the little feast grew near 
its end, Love and Beauty would smoke 
their cigarettes together ; and it was a 
favorite trick of theirs to lower the lamp 
a moment, so that they might see the stars 
rush down upon them through the skylight 
which hung above their table. It gave 
them a sense of great sentinels, far away 
out in the lonely universe, standing guard 
over them, seemed to say that their love 
was safe in the tender keeping of great 
forces. They were poor, but then they 
had the stars and the flowers and the great 
poets for their servants and friends ; and, 
best of all, they had each other. Do you 
call that being poor ? 

And then, in the corner, stood that 



22 PROSE FANCIES 

magical box with the ivory keys, whose 
strings waited ready night and day — 
strange media through which the myriad 
voices, the inner-sweet thoughts, of the 
great world-soul found speech, messengers 
of the stars to the heart, and of the heart 
to the stars. 

Beauty's songs were very simple. 
She got little practice, for her poet only 
cared to have her sing over and over again 
the same sweet songs ; and perhaps if you 
had heard her sing ' Ask nothing more 
of me, sweet,' or ' Darby and Joan,' you 
would have understood his indifference to 
variety. 

At last the little feast is quite, quite 
finished. Beauty has gone home ; her 
lover still carries her face in his heart as 
she waved and waved and waved to him 
from the rattling lighted tramcar ; long he 
sits and sits thinking of her, gazing up at 
those lonely ancient stars ; the air is still 
bright with her presence, sweet with her 
thoughts, warm with her kisses, and as he 
turns to shut the piano, he can still see her 
white hands on the keys and her girlish 



PROSE FANCIES 23 

face raised in an ecstasy — Beata Beatrix 
— above the music. 

* O love, my love ! if I no more should see 
Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee, 

Nor image of thine eyes in any spring — 
How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope 
The ground whirl of the perished leaves of Hope, 

The wind of Death 's imperishable wing ! ' 

And then ... he would throw him- 
self upon his bed and burst into tears. 



* And they are gone j ay, ages long ago : 
These lovers fled away into the storm.' 

The seventh-story heaven once more 
leads a dull life as the office of a ship- 
chandler, and harsh voices grate the air 
where Beauty sang. The books and the 
flowers and the lovers' faces are gone 
forever. I suppose the stars are the 
same, and perhaps they sometimes look 
down through that roof window, and 
wonder what has become of those two 
lovers who used to look up at them so 
fearlessly long ago. 

But friends of mine who believe in 
God say that He has given His angels 



24 PROSE FANCIES 

charge concerning that dingy old seventh- 
floor heaven, and that, for those who have 
eyes to see, there is no place w^here a great 
dream has been dreamed that is not thus 
v^^atched over by the guardian angels of 
memory. 

For M, Le C, 

2^ September^ i8g^. 



PROSE FANCIES — II 



SPRING BY PARCEL 
POST 



They've taken all the Spring from the country to the 

town — 
Like the butter and the eggs, and the milk from the 

cow . , . 

SO began to jig and jingle my thoughts 
as in my letters and newspapers this 
morning I read, buried alive among the 
solitary fastnesses of the Surrey hills, the last 
news from town. The news I envied most 
was that spring had already reached London. 
' Now,' ran a pretty article on spring fash- 
ions, ' the sunshine makes bright the 
streets, and the flower-baskets, like huge 
bouquets, announce the gay arrival of 
spring.* I looked up and out through my 
hillside window. The black ridge on the 
other side of the valley stood a grim wall 
of burnt heather against the sky — which 
sky, like the bullets in the nursery rhyme, 
was made unmistakably of lead ; a close 
rain was falling methodically, and, gener- 

25 



26 PROSE FANCIES 

ally speaking, the world looked like a 
soaked mackintosh. It was n't much like 
the gay arrival of spring, and grimly I 
mused on the advantages of Hfe in town. 

Certainly it did seem hard, I reflected, 
that town should be ahead of us even in 
such a country matter as spring. Flower 
baskets indeed ! Why, we have n't as 
much as a daisy for miles around. It is 
true that on the terrace there the crocuses 
blaze like a street on fire, that the prim- 
roses thicken into clumps, lying among 
their green leaves like pounds of country 
butter J it is true that the blue cones of the 
little grape hyacinth are there, quaintly 
formal as a child's toy flowers ; yes ! and 
the big Dutch hyacinths are already shame- 
lessly enceinte with their buxom waxen 
blooms, so fat and fragrant — (One is 
already delivered of a fine blossom. Well, 
that is a fine baby, to be sure ! say the 
other hyacinths, with babes no less bonny 
under their own green aprons — all wait- 
ing for the doctor sun). Then, among 
the blue-green blades of the narcissus, here 
and there you see a stem topped with a 
creamish chrysalis-like envelope, from 



PROSE FANCIES 27 

ivhich will soon emerge a beautiful eye, 
rayed round with white wings, looking as 
though it were meant to fly, but remaining 
rooted — a butterfly on a stalk; while all 
the beds are crowded with indeterminate 
beak and blade, pushing and elbowing each 
other for a look at the sun, which, how- 
ever, sulkily declines to look at them. It 
is true there is spring on the terrace, but 
even so it is spring imported from the town 
— spring bought in Holborn, spring de- 
livered free by parcel post ; for where 
would the terrace have been but for the 
city seedsman — that magician who sends 
you strangely spotted beans and mysteri- 
ous bulbs in shrivelled cerements, weird 
little flower mummies that suggest centu- 
ries of forgotten silence in painted Egyp- 
tian tombs. This strange and shrivelled 
thing can surely never live again, we say, 
as we hold it in our hands, seeing not the 
glowing circles of colour, tiny rings of 
Saturn, packed so carefully inside this 
flower-egg, the folds of green and silver 
silk wound round and round the precious 
life within. 

But, of course, this is all the seedsman's 



28 PROSE FANCIES 

cunning, and no credit to Nature ; and I 
repeat that were it not for railways and 
the parcel post — goodness knows whether 
we should ever get any spring at all in the 
country ! Think of the days when it had 
to travel down by stage-coach. For, left 
to herself, what is the best Nature can do 
for you with Alarch well on the way ? 
Personally, I find the face of the country 
practically unchanged. It is, to all intents 
and purposes, the same as it has been for 
the last three or four months — as grim, 
as unadorned, as bleak, as draughty, and 
generally as comfortless as ever. There 
is n't a flower to be seen, hardly a bird 
worth listening to, not a tree that is not 
winter-naked, and not a chair to sit down 
upon. If you want flowers on your walks 
you must bring them with you; songs, 
you must take a poet under your arm ; and 
if you want to rest, lean laboriously on 
your stick — or take your chance of rheu- 
matism. 

Of course your specialists, your botan- 
ists, your nature-detectives, will tell you 
otherwise. They have surprised a violet 
in the act of blossoming ; after long and 



PROSE FANCIES 29 

excited chase have discovered a clump 
of primroses in their wild state ; seen one 
butterfly, heard one cuckoo. But as one 
sv^^allow does not make a summer, it takes 
more than one cuckoo to make a spring. 
I confess that only yesterday I saw three 
sulphur butterflies, with my own eyes ; I 
admit the catkins, and the silver-notched 
palm ; and I am told on good colour au- 
thority that there is a lovely purplish bloom, 
almost like plum bloom, over certain copses 
in the valley ; by taking thought, I have 
observed the long horizonal arms of the 
beech growing spurred with little forked 
branches of spear-shaped buds, and I see 
little green nipples pushing out through 
the wolf-coloured rind of the dwarf lir- 
trees. Spring is arming in secret to attack 
the winter — that is sure enough, but 
spring in secret is no spring for me. I 
want to see her marching gaily with green 
pennons, and flashing sun-blades, and a 
good band. 

I want butterflies as they have them at 
the Lyceum — ' butterflies all white,' ' but- 
terflies all blue,' ' butterflies of gold,' and 
I should particularly fancy ' butterflies all 



30 PROSE FANCIES 

black.' But there, again, you see, — you 
must go to town, within hearing of Mrs. 
Patrick Campbell's voix d'or. I want the 
meadows thickly inlaid with buttercups and 
daisies ; I want the trees thick with green 
leaves, the sky all larks and sunshine ; I 
want hawthorn and wild roses — both at 
once ; I want some go, some colour, some 
warmth in the world. O where are the 
pipes of Pan ? 

The pipes of Pan are in town, playing 
at street corners and in the centres of 
crowded circuses, piled high with flower- 
baskets blazing with refulgent flowery 
masses of white and gold. Here are the 
flowers you can only buy in town ; simple 
flowers enough, but only to be had in 
town. Here are fragrant banks of violets 
every few yards, conflagrations of dafl?bdils 
at every crossing, and narcissus in scented 
starry garlands for your hair. 

You wander through the Strand, or along 
Regent street, as through the meadows of 
Enna — sweet scents, sweet sounds, sweet 
shapes, are all about you ; the town but- 
terflies, white, blue and gold, ' wheel and 
shine ' and flutter from shop to shop, sud- 



PROSE FANCIES 31 

denly resurgent from their winter ward- 
robes as from a chrysalis ; bright eyes flash 
and flirt along the merry, jostling street, 
while the sun pours out his golden wine 
overhead, splashing it about from gilded 
domes and bright-faced windows — and 
ever are the voices at the corners and the 
crossings calling out the sweet flower 
names of the spring ! 

But here in the country it is still all 
rain and iron. I am tired of waiting for 
this slow-moving provincial spring. Let 
us to the town to meet the spring — for : 

They've taken all the spring from the country to the 
town — 
Like the butter and the eggs, and the milk from the 

cow; 
And if you want a primrose, you write to London now, 
And if you need a nightingale, well, — Whiteley sends it 
down. 



PROSE FANCIES — III 

THE GREAT MERRY- 
G 0-R OU N D 



IN an age curious of new pleasures, the 
merry-go-round seems still to maintain 
its ancient popularity. I was the other 
day the delighted, indeed the fascinated, 
spectator of one in full swing in an old 
Thames-side town. It was a very superior 
example, with a central musical engine 
of extraordinary splendour, and horses that 
actually curvetted, as they swirled madden- 
ingly round to the strains of ' The Man 
that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.' 
How I longed to join the wild riders ! But 
though I am a brave man, I confess that 
to ride a merry-go-round in front of a 
laughter-loving Cockney public is more 
than I can dare. I had to content myself 
with watching the faces of the riders. I 
noticed particularly one bright-eyed little 
girl, whose whole passionate young soul 
seemed to be on fire with ecstacy, and for 

32 



PROSE FANCIES 33 

whom it was not difficult to prophesy 
trouble when time should bring her within 
reach of more dangerous excitements. 
Then there was a stolid little boy, dull and 
unmoved in expression as though he were 
in church. Life, one felt sure, would be 
safe enough, and stupid enough, for him ; 
the world would have no music to stir or 
draw him. The fifes would go down the 
street with a sweet sound of marching feet, 
and the eyes of other men would brighten 
and their blood be all glancing spears and 
streaming banners, but he would remain 
behind his counter ; from the strange hill 
beyond the town the dear, unholy music, 
so lovely in the ears of other men and 
maids, would call to him in vain, and morn- 
ing and evening the stars would sing above 
his draper's shop, but he never hear a 
word. 

What particularly struck me was the 
number of quite grown-up, even elderly, 
people who came and had their penny- 
worth of horse exercise. Now it was a 
grave young workman quietly smoking his 
pipe as he revolved ; now it was a stout 
middle-aged woman returning from mark- 



34 PROSE FANCIES 

eting, on whom the Zulu music and the 
whirling horses laid their irresistible spells. 
Unless ye become as little children ! 

Is the Kingdom of Heaven really at 
hand ? For, indeed, men and women, and 
perhaps particularly literary men and 
women, are once more becoming as little 
children in their pleasures. 

Seriously, one of the most curious and 
significant of recent literary phenomena is 
the sudden return of the literary man to 
physical, and so-called ' Philistine', pleas- 
ures and modes of recreation. Perhaps 
Stevenson set the fashion with his canoe 
and his donkey. But at the moment that 
he was valiantly daring any one to tell 
him whether there was anything better 
worth doing ' than fooling among boats,' 
Edward Fitzgerald, all unconscious and 
careless of literary fashions, was giving still 
more practical expression to the physical 
faith that was in him, by going shares in a 
Lowestoft herring-lugger, and throwing his 
heart as well as his money into the fortunes 
of its noble skipper ^ Posh.' A literary 
man par excellence^ Mr. Lang reproaches 
his sires for his present way of life — 



PROSE FANCIES 35 

* Why lay your gipsy freedom down 
And doom your child to pen and ink?' 

and by steady and persistent golfing and 
writing about angling and cricket, comes 
as near to the noble savage as is possible 
to so incorrigibly civilised a man. Mr. 
Henley — that Berserker of the pen — 
sings the sword with a vigour that makes 
one curious to see him using it, and we all 
know Mr. Kipling's views on the matter. 
Then Mr. Bernard Shaw rides a bicycle ! 

Those men of letters whose inclinations 
or opportunities do not lead them to these 
out-of-door and more or less ferocious, 
pleasures seek to forget themselves at the 
music hall, the Aquarium or the numerous 
Earl's Court exhibitions. They become 
amateurs of foreign dancing, connoisseurs 
of the trapeze, or they leave their great 
minds at home and go up the Great Wheel. 
Earl's Court, particularly, is becoming 
quite a modern Vauxhall — Tan-ta-ra-ra ! 
Earl's Court! Earl's Court! — and Mr. 
Imre Kiralfy, with his conceptions and 
designs, is to our generation what Albert 
Smith was to the age of Dickens and Ed- 
mund Yates. 



36 PROSE FANCIES 

It takes some experience of life to real- 
ise how right this is ; to realise that, after 
all our line philosophies and cocksure 
sciences, there is no better answer to the 
riddle of things than a good game of cricket 
or an exciting spin on one's ' bike.' The 
real inner significance of Earl's Court — 
Mr. Kiralfy will no doubt be prepared to 
hear — is the failure of science as an 
answer to life. We give up the riddle, 
and enjoy ourselves with our wiser chil- 
dren. Simple pleasures, no doubt, for the 
profound ! But what is simple, and what 
is profound ? 

The simple joy we get from ' fooling 
among boats * on a summer day, the thrill 
of a well-hit ball, the rapture of a skilful 
dive, are no more easy to explain than the 
more complicated pleasures of literature, 
or art, or religion. And why is it — to 
come closer to our theme — that the 
round or the whirling have such attraction 
for us ? What is the secret of the fasci- 
nation of the circle ? Why is it that the 
turning of anything, be it but a barrel- 
organ or a phrase, holds one as with an 
hypnotic power ? I confess that I can 



PROSE FANCIES 37 

never genuinely pity a knife-grinder, how- 
ever needy. Think of the pleasure of 
driving that wheel all day, the merry chirp 
of the knife on the stone, and the crisp 
bright spray of the flying sparks ! Why, 
he does ' what some men dream of all 
their lives'! Wheels of all kinds have 
the same strange charm; mill-wheels, 
colliery-wheels, spinning-wheels, water- 
wheels, and wheeling waters : there may — 
who knows ? — have been a certain pleas- 
ure in being broken on the wheel, and, at 
all events, that hideous punishment is an- 
other curious example of the fascination of 
the circle. It would take a whole volume 
to illustrate the prevalence of the circle in 
external nature, in history, and, even more 
significant, in language. We all know, or 
think we know, that the world is round — 

♦ This orb — this round 
Of sight and sound,' 

as Mr. Quiller Couch sings — though I 
remember a porter at school who was sure 
that it was flat, and who used to say that 
Hamlet's 

* How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable 
Seem to me all the uses of this xvorldT 



38 PROSE FANCIES 

v/as a cryptic reference to Shakespeare*s 
secret belief in his theory. Many of the 
things we love most are round. Is not 
money, according to the proverb, made 
round that it may go round, and are not 
the men most in demand described as ' all- 
round men' ? Nor are all-round women 
without their admirers. Events, we know, 
move in a circle, as time moves in cycles 
— though, alas ! not on them. The bal- 
let and the bicycle are popular forms of the 
circle, and it is the charm of the essay to 
be ' roundabout.' 

Again, how is it that that which on a 
small scale does not impress us at all, 
when on a large scale impresses us so 
much? What is the secret of the im- 
pressiveness of size, bulk, height, depth, 
speed, and mileage ? Philosophically, a 
mountain is no more wonderful than a 
mole-hill, yet no man is knighted for 
climbing a mole-hill. One little drop of 
water and one little grain of sand are 
essentially as wonderful as ' the mighty 
ocean ' or ' the beauteous land ' to which 
they contribute. A balloon is no more 
wonderful than an air-bubble and were 



PROSE FANCIES 39 

you to build an Atlantic liner as big as the 
Isle of Wight it would really be no more 
remarkable than an average steam launch. 
Nobody marvels at the speed of a snail, 
yet, given a snail's pace to start with, an 
express train follows as a matter of course. 
Movement, not the rate of movement, is 
the mystery. Precisely the same materi- 
als, the same forces, the same methods, 
are employed in the little as in the big of 
these examples. Why should mere ac- 
cumulation, reiteration, and magnification 
make the difference ? We may ask why ? 
But it does, for all that. If we answer 
that these mammoth multiplications im- 
press us because they are so much bigger, 
taller, fatter, faster, etc., than we are, the 
question arises. How many times bigger 
than a man must a mountain be before it 
impresses us ? Perhaps the problem has 
already been tackled by the schoolman 
who pondered how many angels could 
dance on the point of a needle. 

However, these and similar first princi- 
ples, it will readily be seen, are far from 
being irrelevant for the visitor at the Earl's 
Court Exhibition. No doubt they are 



40 PROSE FANCIES 

continually discussed by the thousands who 
daily and nightly throng that very charm- 
ing dream-world which Mr. Kiralfy has 
built ' midmost the beating ' of our ' steely 
sea.' 

To an age that is over-read and over-fed 
Mr. Kiralfy brings the message : ' Leave 
your great minds at home, and go up the 
Great Wheel ! ' and I heard his voice and 
obeyed. The sensation is, I should say, 
something between going up in a balloon 
and being upon shipboard — a sensation 
compounded, maybe, of the creaking of 
the circular rigging, the pleasure of rising 
in the air, the freshening of the air as you 
ascend, the strange feeling of the earth 
receding and spreading out beneath you, 
the curious diminution of the people below 
— to their proper size. You will hear 
original minds all about you comparing 
them to ants, and it is curious to notice 
the involuntary feeling of contempt that 
possesses you as you watch them. I be- 
lieve one has a half-defined illusion that 
we are growing greater as they are grow- 
ing smaller. Ants and flies ! ants and 
flies ! with here and there a fiery centipede 



PROSE FANCIES 41 

in the shape of a District train dashing in 
and out amongst them. We lose the 
power of understanding their motions, and 
their throngs and movements do indeed 
seem as purposeless at this height as the 
hurry-scurrying about an ant-hill. At this 
height, indeed, one seems to understand 
how small a matter a bank smash may 
seem to the Almighty ; though, as a lady 
said to me — as we clung tightly together 
in terror ' a-top of the topmost bough ' — 
it must be gratifying to see so many 
churches. 

Those who would keep their illusions 
about the beauty of London had better 
stay below, at least in the daytime, for it 
makes one's heart sink to look on those 
miles and miles of sordid grey roofs hud- 
dled in meaningless rows and crescents, 
just for all the world like a huge child's 
box of wooden bricks waiting to be arranged 
into some intelligible pattern. Of course, 
this is not London proper. Were the 
Great Wheel set up in Trafalgar Square, 
one is fain to hope that the view from it 
would be less disheartening — though it 
might be better not to try. 



42 PROSE FANCIES 

By night, except for the bright oases of 
the Indian Exhibition, the view is little 
more than a black blank, a great inky plain 
with faint sparks and rows of light here 
and there, as though the world had been 
made of saltpetre paper, and had lately 
been set fire to. Were you a traveller 
from Mars you would say that the world 
was very badly lighted. But, for all that, 
night is the time for the Great Wheel, for 
the conflagration of pleasure at our feet 
makes us forget the void dark beyond. 
Then the Wheel seems like a great re- 
volving spider's web, with fireflies entan- 
gled in it at every turn, and the little 
engine-house at the centre, with its two 
electric lights, seems like the great lord 
spider, with monstrous pearls for his eyes. 
And, as in the daytime the height robs the 
depth of its significance, strips poor hu- 
manity of any semblance of impressive or 
attractive meaning, at night the effect is 
just the reverse. What a fairy world is 
this opening out beneath our feet, with its 
golden glowing squares and circles and 
palaces, with its lamplit gardens and pago- 
das, and who are these gay and beautiful 



PROSE FANCIES 43 

beings flitting hither and thither, and pass- 
ing from one bright garden to another on 
the stream of pleasure ! If this many- 
coloured, passionate dream be really human 
life, let us hasten to be down amongst it 
once more ! And, after all, is not this 
flattering night aspect of the world more 
true than that disheartening countenance 
of it in the daylight ? Those golden 
squares and glowing gardens and flashing 
waters are, of course, an illusion of the 
magician Kiralfy's, yet what power could 
the illusion have upon us without the re- 
alities of beauty and love and pleasure it 
attracts there ? 



PROSE FANCIES — IV 

THE BURIAL OF ROMEO 
AND JULIET 

ONE morning of all mornings the citi- 
zens of Verona were startled by 
strange news. Tragic forces, to 
which they had been accustomed to pay 
little heed, had been at work In their city 
during the dark hours, and young Romeo 
of the Montagues, handsome, devil-me- 
care lad as they had known him, and little 
JuHet of the Capulets, that mad-cap, 
merry, gentle young mistress, lay dead, 
side by side In the church of Santa Maria. 
Death! surely they were used to death! 
and Love, flower of the clove ! they were 
used to love. But here were love and death, 
that somehow they could not understand. 
So they hurried In wondering groups to 
Santa Maria, that they might gaze at the 
dead lovers, and thus perhaps come to un- 
derstand. 

Romeo and Juliet lay receiving their 

44 



PROSE FANCIES 45 

guests in the vault of the Capulets, with 
a strange smile of welcome for all who 
came. And their presence-chamber was 
bright with candles and flowers, and sweet 
with the sweet smell of death. The air 
that had drunk in their wild words and 
their last long looks of heavenly love still 
hung about the dark corners, as the air 
where a rose has been holds a little while 
the memory of its breath. Yes ! that 
mornins:, in that dank but shining: tomb. 



g 



you might draw into you the very breath 
of love. The air you breathed had passed 
through the sweet lungs of Juliet, it had 
been etherialised with her holy passion, 
and washed clean with her lovely words. 
And now, for a little while yet, it feasted 
on the fair peace of their glad young faces. 
To-morrow, or the next day, or the next 
week, they would belong to the unvisited 
treasure-house of the past, but now this 
morning of all mornings, this day that 
could never come again, they still belonged 
to the real and radiant present. 

Flowers there are that bloom but once 
in a hundred years, but here in this tomb 
had blossomed one of those marvellous 



46 PROSE FANCIES 

flowers that bloom but once throughout 
eternity. Poets and kings in after-times, 
O men of Verona, will yearn to have 
seen what you look upon to-day. For 
you, you thick and greasy citizens, are 
chosen out of all time to behold this 
beauty. There were once in the world 
thousands of men and women who had 
heard the very words of Christ as they fell 
from His lips, words that we may only 
read. There have been men, actual, liv- 
ing, foolish men, who have looked on at 
the valour of Horatius, men who, from 
the crowded banks of the Nile, have 
watched the living body of Cleopatra step 
into her gilded barge, men who, standing 
idle in the streets of Florence, have seen 
the love-light start in the great Dante's 
eyes, seen his hand move to his laden 
heart, as the little Beatrice passed him by 
among her maidens. Base men of the 
past, by the indulgent accident of time, 
have been granted to behold these wonders, 
and now for you, O men of Verona, a 
like wonder has been born. 

Romeo and Juliet lay receiving their 



PROSE FANCIES 47 

guests in the vault of the Capulets, with 
a strange smile of welcome for all who 
came. 

It had been an innocent little desire, 
yet had all the world come against it. It 
had been a simple little desire, yet too 
strong for all the world to break. 

Strange this enmity of the world to love, 
as though men should take arms against 
the song of a bird, or plot against the 
opening of a flower. 

But now, what was this strange homage 
to a love that a few hours ago had no friend 
in all the daylight, a fearful bliss beneath 
the secret moon ? But yesterday a stupid 
old nurse, a herb-gathering friar, a rascally 
apothecary, had been their only friends, 
and now was all the world come here to 
do their bidding. 

No need to steal again beneath the 
shade of orchard walls, no need again to 
heed if lark or nightingale sang in the red- 
dening east. For the world had grown 
all warm to love, warm and kind as June 
to the rose. 

Three days lay Romeo and Juliet re- 



48 PROSE FANCIES 

ceiving their guests in the vault of the 
Capulets, with that strange smile of wel- 
come for all who came. Three days the 
world worshipped the love it could not un- 
derstand, but still came dense and denser 
throngs to worship. For the news of the 
wonderful flower that had blossomed in 
Verona had gone far and wide, and trav- 
ellers from distant cities kept pouring in 
to look at those strange young lovers, who 
had deemed the world well lost so that 
they might leave it together. 

Then the governor of the city decreed, 
as the time drew near when the two lovers 
must be left to their peace, and it was ill that 
any should lose the sight of this marvel, 
that on the fourth day they should be car- 
ried through the streets in the eyes of all 
the people, and then be buried together in 
the vault of the Capulets — for by this 
burial in the same tomb, says the old 
chronicler, who was first honoured with the 
telling of their sweet story, the governor 
hoped to bring about a peace between the 
Montagues and Capulets, at least for a 
little while. 

Meanwhile, though Verona was a city 



PROSE FANCIES 49 

of many trades and professions, and love 
and death were idle things, yet was there 
little said of business all these days, and 
little else done but talk of the two lovers, 
of whom, indeed, it was true, as it has 
seldom been true out of holy writ, that 
death was swallowed up in victory. Dur- 
ing these days, also, there stole a strange 
sweetness over the city, as though the 
very spirit of love had nested there, and 
was fining the air with its soft breathing 
— as when, in the first days of spring, the 
birds sing so sweetly that broken hearts 
must hide away, and hard hearts grow a 
little kind. Men once more spoke kindly 
to their wives, and even coarse faces wore 
a gentle light — just as sometimes at even- 
ing the setting sun will turn to tenderness 
even black rocks and frowning towers. 

There were many wild stories afloat 
about the end of the lovers. Some said 
one way, and some another. By some 
the story went that Romeo was already 
dead before Juliet had awakened from her 
swoon, but others declared that the poison 
had not worked upon him until Juliet's 
awakening had made him awhile forget 



50 PROSE FANCIES 

that he was to die. There were those 
who professed to know the very words of 
their wild farewell, and in fact there had 
been several witnesses of Juliet's agony 
over the body of her lord. These had 
told how first she had raved and clung to 
him, and called him ' Romeo,' ' Sweet Sir 
Romeo,' ' Husband,' and many flower- 
like names, and had petted him and wooed 
him to come back. Then on a sudden 
she had cried, ' God-a-mercy — how cold 
thou art!' and looked at him long and 
strangely. Then had she grown stern, 
and anon soft. ' Canst thou not come 
back, my love? Then must I follow 
thee. Not so far art thou on the way of 
death, but that I shall overtake thee, and 
together shall we go to Pluto's realm, and 
seek a kinder world.' 

Thereat she had plunged Romeo's dag- 
ger into her side, though some said she 
had stopped her heart's beating by the 
strong will of her great love. Yea — 
such were the distracted rumours — some 
averred that at the last she had cursed 
Christ and his saints, and called upon 
Venus, whom, it was rumoured in awe- 



PROSE FANCIES 51 

struck whispers, was being worshipped 
once more in secret corners of the world. 

It was strong noon when, on the fourth 
day, Romeo and Juliet were carried 
through the bright and solemn streets, that 
the world might be saved ; saved as ever 
by the spectacle and the worship of a mys- 
terious nobility, an uncomprehended great- 
ness, a beauty which haunts not its daily 
dreams, lifted up by the humble gaze of 
devout eyes into the empyrean of greater 
souls, stirred to an unfamiliar passion, and 
fired with glimpses of a strange, unworldly 
truth. 

In the light of the sun, the faces of the 
two lovers, as they lay amid their flowers, 
seemed to have grown a little weary, but 
they still wore their sweet and royal smile, 
and their laurelled brows were very white 
and proud. 

And in the faces that looked upon them, 
as they moved slowly by, with sweet death 
music, and the hushed marching of feet, 
and the wafted odour of lilies, there was to 
be seen strangely blent a great pity for 
their tragedy and a heavenly tenderness 



52 PROSE FANCIES 

for their love. It was like a dream pass- 
ing down the streets of a dream, so deep 
and tender was the silence, for only the 
hearts of men were speaking ; though here 
and there a girl sobbed, or a young man 
buried his face in his sleeve, and the stern- 
est eyes were dashed with the holy water 
of tears. And with the pity and tender- 
ness, who shall say but that in all that 
silent heart-speech there was no little 
envy of the two who had loved so 
truly and died in the springtide of their 
love, before the ways of love had grown 
dusty with its summer, or dreary with its 
autumn, before its dreams had petrified 
into duties, and its passion deadened into 
use ? 

'Would it were thou and I,' said many 
wedded eyes one to the other, delusively 
warm and soft for a moment, but all cold 
and hard again on the morrow. 

And maybe some poet would say in his 
heart : 

' If you loved her living, my Romeo, 
what were your love could you but see 
her dead ! ' for indeed Hfe has no beauty 
so wonderful as the beauty of death. 



PROSE FANCIES 53 

And, as in all places and times, there 
was a base remnant that gaped and wor- 
shipped not, and in their hearts resented 
all this distinction paid^ to a nobility they 
could not recognise, as the like had 
grumbled when Cimabue's Madonna had 
been carried through the streets in glory. 
But of these there is no need that we 
should take account, any more than of 
the beasts that mo. :id head down amid 
the pastures outside the town, knowing 
not of the wonder that was passing within. 
For the ass will munch his thistles though 
the Son of Man be his rider, nor will the 
sheep look aside from his grazing though 
Apollo be the herdsman. 

At length the sacred pageant was ended, 
gone like the passing of an aerial music, 
and the people went to their homes silent, 
with haunted eyes ; while the Earth, which 
had given this beauty, took it back to her- 
self, and one more Persephone of human 
loveliness was shut within the gates of the 
forgetful grave. 



PROS E FAN C I E S— V 

VARIATIONS UPON 
WHITEBAIT 

AVERY Pre-Raphaelite friend of mine 
came to me one day and said, d 
propos of his having designed a very 
Early English chair : ' After all, if one 
has anything to say one might as well put 
it into a chair ! ' 

I thought the remark rather delicious, 
as also his other remark when one day in 
a curiosity-shop we were looking at an- 
other chair, which the dealer declared to 
be Norman. My friend seated himself in 
it very gravely, and after softly moving 
about from side to side, testing it, it would 
appear, by the sensation it imparted to the 
sitting portion of his limbs, he solemnly 
decided: 'I don't think th^ flavour of this 
chair is Norman ! ' 

I thought of this Pre-Raphaelite brother 
as the Sphinx and I were seated a few 
evenings ago at our usual little dinner, in 

54 



PROSE FANCIES 55 

our usual little sheltered corner, on the 
Lover's Gallery of one of the great London 
restaurants. The Sphinx says that there 
is only one place in Europe where one can 
really dine, but as it is impossible to be 
always within reasonable train service of 
that Montsalvat of cookery, she consents 
to eat with me — she cannot call it dine — 
at the restaurant of which I speak. I be- 
ing very simple-minded, untravelled and 
unlanguaged, think it, in my Cockney 
heart, a very fine place indeed, with its 
white marble pillars surrounding the spa- 
cious peristyle and flashing with a thousand 
brilliant lights and colours : with its stately 
cooks, clothed in white samite, mystic 
wonderful, ranged behind a great altar 
loaded with big silver dishes, and the 
sacred musicians of the temple ranged be- 
hind them — while in and out go the 
waiters, clothed in white and black, 
waiters so good and kind that I am com- 
pelled to think of Elijah being waited on 
by angels. 

They have such an eye for a romance, 
too, and really take it personally to heart 
if it should befall that our httle table is 



56 PROSE FANCIES 

usurped by others that know not love. I 
like them, too, because they really seem to 
have an eye for the strange beauty and 
charm of the Sphinx, quite an unexpected 
taste for Botticelli. They ill-conceal their 
envy of my lot, and sometimes, in the 
meditative pauses between the courses, I 
see them romantically reckoning how it 
might be possible by desperately saving up, 
by prodigious windfalls of tips, from unex- 
ampled despatch and sweetness in their 
ministrations, how it might be possible in 
ten years* time, perhaps even in five — 
the lady would wait five years ! and her 
present lover could be artistically poisoned 
meanwhile ! — how it might be possible to 
come and sue for her beautiful hand. 
Then a harsh British cry for 'waiter' 
comes like a rattle and scares away that 
beautiful dream-bird, though, as the poor 
dreamer speeds on the quest of roast beef 
for four, you can see it still circling with 
its wonderful blue feathers around his 
pomatumed head. 

Ah, yes, the waiters know that the 
Sphinx is no ordinary woman. She can- 
not conceal even from them the mystical 



PROSE FANCIES 57 

star of her face, they too catch far echoes 
of the strange music of her brain, they too 
grow dreamy with dropped hints of fra- 
grance from the rose of her wonderful heart. 

How reverently do they help her doff 
her little cloak of silk and lace : with 
what a worshipful inclination of the head, 
as in the presence of a deity, do they 
await her verdict of choice between rival 
soups — shall it be 'clear or thick'? 
And when she decides on 'thick,' how re- 
lieved they seem to be, as if — well, some 
few matters remain undecided in the uni- 
verse, but never mind, this is settled for- 
ever — no more doubts possible on one 
portentous issue, at any rate — Madame 
will take her soup ' thick.' 

' On such a night ' our talk fell upon 
whitebait. 

As the Sphinx's silver fork rustled 
among the withered silver upon her plate, 
she turned to me and said : 

' Have you ever thought what beautiful 
little things these whitebait are ? ' 

' Oh, yes,' I replied, ' they are the 
daisies of the deep sea, the threepenny- 
pieces of the ocean.' 



58 PROSE FANCIES 

' You dear ! ' said the Sphinx, who is 
alone in the world in thinking me awfully 
clever. ' Go on, say something else, some- 
thing pretty about whitebait — there's a 
subject for you!' 

Then it was that, fortunately, I remem- 
bered my Pre-Raphaelite friend, and I 
sententiously remarked : ' Of course, if 
one has anything to say one cannot do 
better than to say it about whitebait. 
. . . Well, whitebait . . . 

But here, providentially, the band of 
the beef — that is, the band behind the 
beef; that is, the band that nightly hymns 
the beef (the phrase is to be had in three 
qualities) — struck up the overture from 
' Tannhauser,' which is not the only 
music that makes the Sphinx forget my ex- 
istence ; and thus, forgetting me, she mo- 
mentarily forgot the whitebait. But I 
remembered, remembered hard — worked 
at pretty things, as metal workers punch 
out their flowers of brass and copper. 
The music swirled about us like golden 
waves, in which swam myriad whitebait, 
like showers of tiny stars, like falling 



PROSE FANCIES 59 

snow. To me it was one grand proces- 
sional of whitebait, silver ripples upon 
streams of gold. 

The music stopped. The Sphinx 
turned to me with the soul of Wagner in 
her eyes, and then she turned to the waiter : 
' Would it be possible,' she said, ' to per- 
suade the bandmaster to play that wonder- 
ful thing over again ? ' 

The waiter seemed a little doubtful, 
even for the Sphinx, but he went off to the 
bandmaster with the air of the man who 
has at last an opportunity to show that he 
can dare all for love. Personally, I have 
a suspicion that he poured his month's sav- 
ings at the bandmaster's feet, and begged 
him to do this thing for the most won- 
derful lady in the world; or perhaps the 
bandmaster was really a musician, and 
his musician's heart was touched — 
lonely there amid the beef — to think 
that there was really someone, invisible 
though she were to him, some shrouded 
silver presence, up there among the beef- 
eaters, who really loved to hear great 
music. Perhaps it was thus made a night 



6o PROSE FANCIES 

he has never forgotten ; perhaps it changed 
the whole course of his hfe — who knows ? 
The sweet, reassuring request may have 
come to him at a moment when, sick at 
heart, he was deciding to abandon real 
music forever, and settle down amid the 
beef and the beef-music of Old England. 

Well, however it was, the waiter came 
back radiant with a ' Yes ' on every shin- 
ing part of him, and if the ' Tannhauser * 
had been played well at first, certainly the 
orchestra surpassed themselves this second 
time. 

When the great jinnee of music had 
once more swept out of the hall, the 
Sphinx turned with shining eyes to the 
waiter : 

' Take,' she said, ' take these tears to 
the bandmaster. He has indeed earned 
them.' 

'Tears, little one,' I said. 'See how 
they swim like whitebait in the fishpools 
of your eyes ! ' 

' Oh, yes, the whitebait,' rejoined the 
Sphinx, glad of a subject to hide her emo- 
tion. ' Now tell me something nice 



PROSE FANCIES 6i 

about them, though the poor little things 
have long since disappeared. Tell me, 
for instance, how they get their beautiful 
little silver waterproofs ? ' 

' Electric Light of the World,' I said, 
' it is like this. While they are still quite 
young and full of dreams, their mother 
takes them out in picnic parties of a billion 
or so at a time to where the spring moon 
is shining, scattering silver from its purse 
of pearl far over the wide waters — silver, 
silver for every little whitebait that cares to 
swim and pick it up. The mother, who has 
a contract with some such big restaura- 
teur as ours, chooses a convenient area of 
moonlight, and then at a given sign they 
all turn over on their sides, and bask and 
bask in the rays, little fin pressed lov- 
ingly against little fin — for this is the 
happiest time in the young whitebait's 
life : it is at these silvering parties that 
matches are made and future consignments 
of whitebait arranged for. Well, night 
after night, they thus lie in the moonlight, 
first on one side, then on the other, till by 
degrees, tiny scale by scale, they have be- 



62 PROSE FANCIES 

come completely lunar-plated. Ah ! how 
sad they are when the end of that happy 
time has come.' 

' And what happens to them after 
that? ' asked the Sphinx. 

' One night when the moon is hidden 
their mother comes to them with treach- 
erous wile, and suggests that they should 
go off on a holiday again to seek the moon 
— the moon that for a moment seems 
captured by the pearl fishers of the sky. 
And so off they go merrily, but, alas, no 
moon appears, and presently they are 
aware of unwieldy bumping presences upon 
the surface of the sea, presences as of huge 
dolphins, and rough voices call across the 
water, till, scared, the little whitebaits, turn 
home in flight — to find themselves some- 
how meshed in an invisible prison, a net 
as fine and strong as air, into which, O 
agony, they are presently hauled, lovely 
banks of silver, shining like opened coffers 
beneath the coarse and ragged flares of 
yellow torches. The rest is silence.' 

' What sad little lives ! and what a 
cruel world it is ! ' said the Sphinx — as she 



PROSE FANCIES 63 

crunched with her knife through the body 
of a lark, that but yesterday had been sing- 
ing in the blue sky. Its spirit sang just 
above our heads as she ate, and the air 
was thick with the grey ghosts of all the 
whitebait she had eaten that night. 

But there were no longer any tears in 
her eyes. 



PROSE FANCIES— VI 

THE ANSWER OF 
THE ROSE 



THE Sphinx and I sat in our little box 
at Romeo and 'Juliet. It was the first 
time she had seen that fairy-tale of 
passion upon the stage. I had seen it 
played once before — in Paradise. There- 
fore, I rather trembled to see it again in 
an earthly play-house, and as much as pos- 
sible kept my eyes from the stage. All I 
knew of the performance — but how much 
was that ! — was two lovely voices making 
love like angels ; and when there were no 
words, the music told me what was going 
on. Love speaks so many languages. 

One might as well look. It was as 
clear as moonlight to the tragic eye within 
the heart. The Sphinx was gazing on it 
all with those eyes that will never grow 
old, neither for years nor tears; but though 
I seemed to be seeing nothing but an ad- 
vertisement of Paderewski pianos on the 
64 



PROSE FANCIES 65 

programme, I saw it — O did n't I see it? 

— all. The house had grown dark, and 
the music low and passionate, and for a 
moment no one was speaking. Only, 
deep in the thickets of my heart, there 
sang a tragic nightingale that, happily, 
only I could hear; and I said to myself, 
' Now the young fool is climbing the or- 
chard wall ! Yes, there go Benvolio and 
Mercutio calHng him; and now — 'he 
jests at scars who never felt a wound ' — 
the other young fool is coming out on to 
the balcony. God help them both ! They 
have no eyes — no eyes — or surely they 
would see the shadow that sings " Love ! 
Love ! Love ! " like a fountain in the 
moonlight, and then shrinks away to 
chuckle " Death ! Death ! Death ! " in the 
darkness ! ' 

But, soft, what light from yonder win- 
dow breaks ! 

The Sphinx turned to me for sympathy 

— this time it was the soul of Shakespeare 
in her eyes. 

'Yes!' I whispered, 'it is the Opening 
of the Eternal Rose, sung by the Eternal 
Nightingale ! ' 



66 PROSE FANCIES 

She pressed my hand approvingly ; and 
while the lovely voices made their heav- 
enly love, I slipped out my silver-bound 
pocket-book of ivory and pressed w^ithin it 
the rose w^hich had just fallen from my 
iips. 

The worst of a great play is that one is 
so dull between the acts. Wit is sacri- 
lege, and sentiment is bathos. Not an- 
other rose fell from my lips during the 
performance, though that I minded little, as 
I was the more able to count the pearls that 
fell from the Sphinx's eyes. 

It took quite half a bottle of champagne 
to pull us up to our usual spirits, as we sat 
at supper at a window where we could 
see London spread out beneath us like a 
huge black velvet flower, dotted with fiery 
embroideries, sudden flaring stamens, and 
rows of ant-like fireflies moving in slow 
zig-zag processions along and across its 
petals. 

' How strange it seems,' said the Sphinx, 
* to think that for every two of those mov- 
ing double-lights, which we know to be 
the eyes of hansoms, but which seem up 
here nothing but gold dots in a very bar- 



PROSE FANCIES 67 

baric pattern of black and gold, there are 
two human beings, no doubt, at this time 
of night — two lovers, throbbing with the 
joy of life, and dreaming, heaven knows 
what dreams. 

' Yes,' I rejoined ; ' and to them I 'm 
afraid we are even more impersonal. 
From their little Piccadilly coracles our 
watch-tower in the skies is merely a radi- 
ant facade of glowing windows, and no 
one of all who glide by realises that the 
spirited illumination is every bit due to 
your eyes. You have but to close them, 
and every one will be asking what has 
gone wrong with the electric lights.' 

A little nonsense is a great healer of the 
heart, and by means of such nonsense as 
this we grew merry again. And anon we 
grew sentimental and poetic, but — thank 
heaven! we were no longer tragic. 

Presently I had news for the Sphinx. 
' The rose-tree that grows in the garden 
of my mind,' I said, 'desires to blossom.' 

'May it blossom indeed,' she replied; 
' for it has been flowerless all this long 
evening ; and bring me a rose fresh with 
all the dews of inspiration — no florist's 



68 PROSE FANCIES 

flower, wired and artificially scented — no 
bloom of yesterday's hard-driven brains.' 

' I was only thinking,' I said, ' d propos 
of nightingales and roses, that though all 
the world has heard the song of the night- 
ingale to the rose, only the nightingale has 
heard the answer of the rose. You know 
what I mean ? ' 

' Know what you mean! Of course, 
that 's always easy enough,' retorted the 
Sphinx, who knows well how to be hard 
on me. 

' I 'm so glad,' I ventured to thrust 
back ; ' for lucidity is the first success of 
expression : to make others see clearly 
what we ourselves are struggling to see, 
believe with ' all their hearts what we are 
just daring to hope, is — well, the religion 
of a literary man! ' 

' Yes, it 's a pretty idea,' said the Sphinx, 
once more pressing the rose of my thought 
to her brain ; ' and, indeed, it's more than 
pretty. . . .* 

'Thank you!' I said humbly. 

' Yes, it 's true — and many a humble 
little rose will thank you for it. For, 
your nightingale is a self-advertising bird. 



PROSE FANCIES 69 

He never sings a song without an eye on 
the critics, sitting up there in their stalls 
among the stars. He never, or seldom, 
sings a song for pure love, just because 
he must sing it or die. Indeed, he has a 
great fear of death, unless — you will guar- 
antee him immortality. But the rose, the 
trusting little earth-born rose, that must 
stay all her life rooted in one spot till some 
nightingale comes to choose her — some 
nightingale whose song maybe has been 
inspired and perfected by a hundred other 
roses, which are at the moment pot-pourri 
— ah, the shy bosom-song of the rose . . .' 

Here the Sphinx paused, and added ab- 
ruptly — 

' Well, there is no nightingale worthy 
to hear it!' 

' It is true,' I agreed, ' O trusting, Httle 
earth-born rose ! ' 

' Do you know why the rose has thorns ? ' 
suddenly asked the Sphinx. Of course I 
knev/, but I always respect a joke, par- 
ticularly when it is but half-born — 
humourists always prefer to deliver them- 
selves — so I shook my head. 

' To keep off the nightingales, of course/ 



70 PROSE FANCIES 

said the Sphinx, the tone of her voice 
holding in mocking solution the words 
'Donkey* and 'Stupid,' — which I rec- 
ognized and meekly bore. 

' What an excellent idea ! ' I said. ' I 
never thought of it before. But don't you 
think it 's a little unkind ? For, after all, 
if there were no nightingales, one should n't 
hear so much about the rose ; and there is 
always the danger that if the rose continues 
too painfully thorny, the nightingale may 
go off and seek, say, a more accommo- 
dating lily.' 

' I have no opinion of lilies,' said the 
Sphinx. 

' Nor have I,' I answered soothingly, 
' I much prefer roses — but . . . 
but . . .' 

' But what ? ' 

' But — well, I much prefer roses. 
Indeed I do.' 

' Rose of the World,' I continued with 
sentiment, ' draw in your thorns. I can- 
not bear them.' 

'Ah!' she answered eagerly, 'that is 
just it. The nightingale that is worthy of 
the rose will not only bear, but positively 



PROSE FANCIES 71 

love, her thorns. It is for that reason 
she wears them. The thorns of the 
rose properly understood are but the 
tests of the nightingale. The nightingale 
that is frightened of the thorns is not 
worthy of the rose — of that you may be 
sure ' 

' I am not frightened of the thorns,' [ 
managed to interject. 

' Sing then once more,' she cried, ' the 
Song of the Nightingale.' 

And it was thus I sang : — 

Rose of the World, a nightingale, 
A Bird of the World, am I, 

1 have loved all the world and sung all the world, 

But I come to your side to die. 

Tired of the world, as the world of me, 

I plead for your quiet breast, 
I have loved all the world and sung all the world — 

But — where is the nightingale's nest ? 

In a hundred gardens I sung the rose. 

Rose of the World, I confess — 
But for every rose I have sung before 

I love you the more, not less. 

Perfect it grew by each rose that died. 

Each rose that has died for you, 
The song that I sing — yea, ' tis no new song, 

It is tried — and so it is true. 



72 PROSE FANCIES 

Petal or thorn, yea ! I have no care, 

So that I here abide, 
Pierce me, my love, or kiss me, my love, 

But keep me close to your side. 

I knov^ not your kiss from your scorn, my love, 
Your breast from your thorn, my rose. 

And if you must kill me, well, kill me, my love ! 
But — say 't was the death I chose. 

' Is It true .? * asked the Rose. 

' As I am a nightingale,' I replied ; and 
as we bade each other good-night, I 
whispered : 

' When may I expect the Answer of the 
Rose ? ' 



PROSE FANCIES— VII 



ABOUT THE SE 
C U R I TI E S 



WHEN I say that my friend Mat- 
thew lay dying, I want you so 
far as possible to dissociate the 
statement from any conventional, and cer- 
tainly from any pictorial, conceptions of 
death which you may have acquired. 
Death sometimes shows himself one of 
those impersonal artists who conceal their 
art, and, unless you had been told, you 
could hardly have guessed that Matthew 
was dying, dying indeed sixty miles an 
hour, dying of consumption, dying because 
some one else had died four years before, 
dying, too, of debt. 

Connoisseurs, of course, would have 
understood ; at a glance would have 
named the sculptor who was silently 
chiselling those noble hollows in the 
finely modelled face — that Pygmalion 
who turns all flesh to stone — at a glance 

73 



74 PROSE FANCIES 

would have named the painter who was 
cunningly weighting the brows with dark- 
ness that the eyes might shine the more 
with an unaccustomed light. Matthew 
and I had long been students of the strange 
wandering artist, had begun by hating his 
art (it is ever so with an art unfamiliar to 
us) and had ended by loving it. 

' Let us see what the artist has added 
to the picture since yesterday,* said Mat- 
thew, signing to me to hand him the 
mirror. 

' H'm,' he murmured, ' he's had one 
of his lazy days, I'm afraid. He's hardly 
added a touch — just a little heightened 
the chiaroscuro, sharpened the nose a trifle, 
deepened some little the shadows round 
the eyes . . .' 

' O why,' he presently sighed, ' does 
he not work a little overtime and get it 
done ? He's been paid handsomely 
enough . . ." 

' Paid,' he continued, ' by a life that is 
so much undeveloped gold-mine, paid by 
all my uncashed hopes and dreams . . .' 

' He works fast enough for me, old fel- 



PROSE FANCIES 75 

low,' I ''nterrupted, 'there was a time, was 
there not, when he worked too fast for 
you and me ? * 

There are moments, for certain people, 
when such fantastic unreality as this is the 
truest realism. Matthew and I talked like 
this with our brains, because we hadn't 
the courage to allow our hearts to break 
in upon the conversation. Had I dared to 
say some real emotional thing, what effect 
would it have had but to set poor tired 
Matthew a-coughing ? and it was our aim 
that he should die with as little to-do as 
practicable. The emotional in such situa- 
tions is merely the obvious. There was 
no need for either of us to state the elem- 
entary feelings of our love. I knew that 
Matthew was going to die, and he knew 
that — I was going to live; and we pitied 
each other accordingly, though I confess 
my feeling for him was rather one of 
envy — when it was not congratulation. 

Thus, to tell the truth, we never men- 
tioned ' the hereaRer.' I don't believe i: 
even occurred to us. Indeed, we spent 
the few hours that remained of our friend- 



76 PROSE FANCIES 

ship in retailing the latest gathered of those 
good stories with which we had been ac- 
customed to salt our intercourse. 

One of Matthew's anecdotes was, no 
doubt, somewhat suggested by the occa- 
sion, and I should add that he had always 
somewhat of an ecclesiastical bias, and 
would, I believe, have ended some day as a 
Monsignor, a notable ' Bishop Blougram.' 

His story was of an evangelistic 
preacher who desired to impress his con- 
gregation with the unmistakable reality of 
hell-fire. ' You know the Black Country, 
my friends,' he had declaimed, 'you have 
seen it, at night, flaring with a thousand 
furnaces, in the lurid incandescence of 
which myriads of unhappy beings, our 
fellow-creatures (God forbid ! ) snatch a 
precarious existence, you have seen them 
silhouetted against the yellow glare, run- 
ning hither and thither as it seemed from 
afar, in the very jaws of the awful fire. 
Have you realized that the burdens with 
which they thus run hither and thither 
are molten iron, iron to which such a 
stupendous heat has been applied that it 
has melted, melted as though it had been 



PROSE FANCIES 77 

sugar in the sun — well ! returning to hell- 
fire, let me tell you this, that in hell they 
eat this fiery molten metal for ice-cream! 
yes ! and are glad to get anything so cool.' 

It was thus we talked while Matthew 
lay dying, for why should we not talk as 
we had lived ? We both laughed long 
and heartily over this story, perhaps it 
would have amused us less had Matthew 
not been dying; and then his kind old 
nurse brought in our lunch. We had 
both excellent appetites, and were far from 
indifferent to the dainty little meal which 
was to be our last but one together. I 
brought my table as close to Matthew's 
pillow as was possible, and he stroked my 
hand with tenderness in which there was a 
touch of gratitude. 

' You are not frightened of the bacteria ! ' 
he laughed sadly, and then he told me, 
with huge amusement, how a friend (and 
a true, dear friend for all that) had come 
to see him a day or two before, and had 
hung over the end of the bed to say fare- 
well, daring to approach no nearer, mop- 
ping his fear-perspiring brows with a 
handkerchief soaked in ^ Eucalyptus ' ! 



78 PROSE FANCIES 

' He had brought an anticipatory elegy, 
too,' said my friend, ' written against my 
burial. I wish you M read it for me,' and 
he fidgeted for it in the nervous manner 
of the dying. Finding it among his 
pillows, he handed it to me saying, ' you 
need n't be frightened of it. It is well 
dosed with Eucalyptus.' 

We laughed even more over this poem 
than over our stories, and then we dis- 
cussed the terms of three cremation socie- 
ties to which, at the express request of my 
friend, I had written a day or two before. 

Then having smoked a cigar and drunk 
a glass of port together (for the assured 
dying are allowed to ' live well '), Matthew 
grew sleepy, and tucking him beneath the 
counterpane, I left him, for, after all, he 
was not to die that day. 

Circumstances prevented my seeing him 
again for a week. When I did so, entering 
the room poignantly redolent of the strange 
sweet odour of antiseptics, I saw that the 
great artist had been busy in my absence. 
Indeed, his work was nearly at end. Yet 
to one unfamiliar v/ith his methods, there 
was still little to alarm in Matthew's face. 



PROSE FANCIES 79 

In fact, with the exception of his brain, 
and his ice-cold feet, he was alive as ever. 
And even to his brain had come a certain 
unnatural activity, a life as of the grave, a 
sort of vampire vitality, which would as- 
suredly have deceived any who had not 
known him. He still told his stories, 
laughed and talked with the same uncon- 
querable humour, was in every way alert 
and practical, with this difference, that he 
had forgotten he was going to die, that the 
world in which he exercised his various 
faculties was another world to that in 
which, in spite of his delirium, we ate our 
last boiled fowl, drank our last wine, 
smoked our last cigar together. His talk 
was so convincingly rational, dealt with 
such unreal matters in so every-day a 
fashion,that you were ready to think that 
surely it was you and not he whose mind 
was wandering. 

' You might reach that pocket-book, and 
ring for Mrs. Davies,' he would say in so 
casual a way that of course you would 
ring. On Mrs. Davies's appearance he 
would be fumbling about among the papers 
in his pocket-book, and presently he would 



8o PROSE FANCIES 

say, with a look of frustration that went 
to one's heart — ' I 've got a ten-pound 
note somewhere here for you, Mrs. Davies, 
to pay you up till Saturday, but somehow 
I seem to have lost it. Yet it must be 
somewhere about. Perhaps you '11 find it 
as you make the bed in the morning. Pm 
so sorry to have troubled you. . . .' 

And then he would grow tired and doze 
a little on his pillow. 

Suddenly he would be alert again, and 
with a startling vividness tell me strange 
stories from the dreamland into which he 
was now passing. 

I had promised to see him on Mon- 
day, but had been prevented, and had 
wired to him accordingly. This was 
Tuesday. 

' You need n't have troubled to wire,* 
he said. ' Did n't you know I was in 
London from Saturday to Monday ? ' 

' The doctor and Mrs. Davies did n't 
know,' he continued, with the creepy 
cunning of the dying, ' I managed to slip 
away to look at a house I think of taking 
— in fact I've taken it. It's in — in — 
now, where is it ? Now is n't that silly ? 



PROSE FANCIES 8i 

I can see it as plain as anything — yet I 
cannot, for the life of me, remember 
where it is, or the number. ... It 
was somewhere St. John's Wood way 
. never mind, you must come and 
see me there, when we get in. . . .' 

I said he was dying in debt, and thus 
the heaven that lay about his death-bed 
was one of fantastic Eldorados, sudden 
colossal legacies, and miraculous windfalls. 

' I have n't told you,' he said presently, 
' of the piece of good luck that has befallen 
me. You are not the only person in luck. 
I can hardly expect you to believe me, it 
sounds so much like the Arabian nights. 
However, it's true for all that. Well, one 
of the little sisters was playing in the gar- 
den a few afternoons ago, making mud- 
pies or something of that sort, and she 
suddenly scraped up a sovereign. Pres- 
ently she found two or three more, and 
our curiosity becoming aroused, a turn or 
two with the spade revealed quite a bed of 
gold, and the end of it was that on further 
excavating, the whole garden proved to be 
one mass of sovereigns. Sixty thousand 
pounds we counted . . . and then, what 



82 PROSE FANCIES 

do you think — it suddenly melted away. 

He paused for a moment, and continued, 
more in amusement than regret — 

' Yes — the government got wind of it, 
and claimed the whole lot as treasure- 
trove ! ' 

' But not,' he added slyly, ' before I 'd 
paid off two or three of my biggest bills. 
Yes — and — you '11 keep it quiet, of course, 
there 's another lot been discovered in the 
garden, but we shall take good care the 
government doesn't get hold of it this 
time, you bet.' 

He told this wild story with such an air 
of simple conviction that, odd as it may 
seem, one believed every word of it. But 
the tale of his sudden good fortune was 
not ended. 

' You 've heard of old Lord Osterley,' 
he presently began again. ' Well, con- 
gratulate me, old man, he has just died 
and left everything to me. You know 
what a splendid library he had — to think 
that that will all be mine — and that grand 
old park through which we 've so often 
wandered, you and L Well, we shall 



PROSE FANCIES 83 

need fear no gamekeeper now, and of 
course, dear old fellow, you '11 come and 
live with me — like a prince — and just 
write your own books and say farewell to 
journalism forever. Of course, I can 
hardly believe it 's true yet. It seems too 
much of a dream, and yet there's no doubt 
about it. I had a letter from my solicit- 
ors this morning, saying that they were 
engaged in going through the securities, 
and — and — but the letter's somewhere 
over there, you might read it. No? 
Can't you find it ? It 's there somewhere 
about, I know. Never mind, you can see 
it again . . . ' he finished wearily. 

' Yes ! ' he presently said, half to him- 
self, ' it will be a wonderful change ! a 
wonderful change ! ' 

At length the time came to say good- 
bye, a good-bye I knew must be the last, 
for my affairs were taking me so far away 
from him that I could not hope to see him 
for some days. 

' I 'm afraid, old man,' I said, ' that I 
mayn't be able to see you for another 
week.' 

' O never mind, old fellow, don't worry 



84 PROSE FANCIES 

about me. I 'm much better now — and 
by the time you come again we shall know 
all about the securities/ 

The securities! My heart had seemed 
like a stone, incapable of feeling, all those 
last unreal hours together, but the pathos of 
that sad phrase so curiously symbolic, sud- 
denly smote it with overwhelming pity, 
and the tears sprang to my eyes for the 
first time. 

As I bent over him to kiss his poor 
damp forehead, and press his hand for the 
last farewell, I murmured — 

' Yes — dear, dear old friend. We shall 
know all about the securities . . .' 



PROSE FANCIES— VIII 



THE BOOM IN 
YELLOW 



GREEN must always have a large 
following among artists and art 
lovers ; for, as has been pointed 
out, an appreciation of it is a sure sign of 
a subtle artistic temperament. There is 
something not quite good, something 
almost sinister, about it — at least, in its 
more complex forms, though in its simple 
form, as we find it in outdoor nature, it is 
innocent enough ; and, indeed, is it not 
used in colloquial metaphor as an adjective 
for innocence itself ? Innocence has but 
two colours, white or green. But Becky 
Sharp's eyes also were green, and the green 
of the aesthete does not suggest innocence. 
There will always be wearers of the green 
carnation ; but the popular vogue which 
green has enjoyed for the last ten or 
fifteen years is probably passing. Even 
the aesthete himself would seem to be 

85 



86 PROSE FANCIES 

growing a little weary of its indefinitely 
divided tones, and to be anxious for a 
colour sensation somewhat more positive 
than those to be gained from almost im- 
perceptible nuances of green. Jaded with 
over-refinements and super-subtleties, we 
seem in many directions to be harking back 
to the primary colours of life. Blue, crude 
and unsoftened, and a form of magenta, 
have recently had a short innings ; and 
now the triumph of yellow is imminent. 
Of course, a love for green implies some 
regard for yellow, and in our so-called 
aesthetic renaissance the sunflower went 
before the green carnation — which is, 
indeed, the badge of but a small schism of 
aesthetes, and not worn by the great body 
of the more catholic lovers of beauty. 

Yellow is becoming more and more 
dominant in decoration — in wall-papers, 
and flowers cultivated with decorative 
intention, such as chrysanthemums. And 
one can easily understand why : seeing 
that, after white, yellow reflects more 
light than any other colour, and thus min- 
isters to the growing preference for light 
and joyous rooms. A few yellow chrys- 



PROSE FANCIES 87 

anthemums will make a small room look 
twice its size, and when the sun comes out 
upon a yellow wall-paper the whole room 
seems suddenly to expand, to open like a 
flower. When it falls upon the pot of 
yellow chrysanthemums, and sets them 
ablaze, it seems as though one had an 
angel in the room. Bill-posters are be- 
ginning to discover the attractive qualities 
of the colour. Who can ever forget 
meeting for the first time upon a hoarding 
Mr. Dudley Hardy's wonderful Yellow 
Girl, the pretty advance guard of To-Day ? 
But I suppose the honour of the discovery 
of the colour for advertising purposes rests 
with Mr. Colman ; though its recent boom 
comes from the publishers, and particularly 
from the Bodley Head. ' The Yellow Book 
with any other colour would hardly have 
sold as well — the first private edition of 
Mr. Arthur Benson's poems by the way, 
came caparisoned in yellow, and with the 
identical name, Le Cahier Jautie ; and no 
doubt it was largely its title that made the 
success of The Yellow Aster. In literature, 
indeed, yellow has long been the colour of 
romance. The word ' yellow-back * wit- 



88 PROSE FANCIES 

nesses its close association with fiction ; 
and in France, as we know, it is the all 
but universal custom to bind books in 
yellow paper. Mr. Heinemann and Mr. 
Unwin have endeavoured to naturalise the 
custom here ; but, though in cloth yellow 
has emphatically ' caught on,' in paper it 
still hangs fire. The ABC Railway 
Guide is probably the only exception, and 
that, it is to be hoped, is not fiction. Mr. 
Lang has recently followed the fashion 
with his Yellow Fairy Book; and, indeed, 
one of the best known figures in fairy dom 
is yellow — namely, the Yellow Dwarf. 
Yellow, always a prominent Oriental 
colour, was but lately of peculiar signifi- 
cance in the Far East; for were not the 
sorrows of a certain high Chinese oflicial 
intimately connected with the fatal colour ? 
The Yellow Book, the Yellow Aster, the 
Yellow Jacket ! — and the Yellow Fever, 
like ' Orion ' Home's sunshine, is always 
with us ' somewhere in the world.' The 
same applies also, I suppose, to the Yellow 
Sea. 

Till one comes to think of it, one hardly 
realises how many important and pleasant 



PROSE FANCIES 89 

things in life are yellow. Blue and green, 
no doubt, contract for the colouring of 
vast departments of the physical world. 
' Blue !' sings Keats, in a fine but too little 
known sonnet — 

', . . 'Tis the life of heaven — the domain 
Of Cynthia — the wide palace of the sun — 

The tent of Hesperus, and all his train — 

The bosomer of clouds, gold, grey, and dun. 

Blue! 'Tis the life of waters . . . 

Blue ! Gentle cousin of the forest green. 
Married to green in all the sweetest flowers.' 

Yellow might retort by quoting Mr. 
Grant Allen, in his book on The Colour 
Sense^ to the effect that the blueness of sea 
and sky is mainly poetical illusion or inac- 
curacy, and that sea and sky are found 
blue only in one experiment out of four- 
teen. At morning and evening they are 
usually in great part stained golden. Blue 
certainly has one advantage over yellow; in 
that it has the privilege of colouring some 
of the prettiest eyes in the world. Yellow 
has a chance only in cases of jaundice 
and liver complaint, and his colour scheme 
in such cases is seldom appreciated. 
Again, green has the contract for the 
greater bulk of the vegetable life of the 



90 PROSE FANCIES 

globe ; but his is a monotonous business, 
like the painting of miles and miles of pal- 
ings, grass, grass, grass, trees, trees, trees, 
ad infinitum ; whereas yellow leads a rov- 
ing versatile life, and is seldom called upon 
for such monotonous labour. The sands 
of Sahara are probably the only conspicu- 
ous instance of yellow thus working by 
the piece. It is in the quality, in the di- 
versity of the things it colours, rather than 
in their mileage or tonnage, that yellow is 
distinguished ; though for that matter, we 
suppose, the sun is as big and heavy as 
most things, and that is yellow. Of 
course, when we say yellow we include 
golden, and all varieties of the colour — saf- 
fron, orange, flaxen, tawny, blonde, topaz, 
citron, etc. 

If the sun may reasonably be described 
as the most important object in the world, 
surely money is the next. That, as we 
know, is, in its most potent metallic form, 
yellow also. The ' yellow gold ' is a fa- 
vourite phrase in certain forms of poetry ; 
and ' yellow-boys ' is a term of natural 
affection among sailors. Following the 
example of their lord the sun, most fires 



PROSE FANCIES 91 

and lights are yellow or golden, and it is 
only in times of danger or superstition that 
they burn red or blue. And, if yellow be 
denied entrance to beautiful eyes, it enjoys 
a privilege which — except in the case of 
certain mdij -staining African tribes, who 
cannot be said to count — blue has never 
claimed, that of colouring perhaps the 
loveliest thing in the world, the hair of 
woman. Hair is naturally golden — unnatu- 
rally also. When Browning sings pathetic- 
ally of ' dear dead women — with such 
hair too ! ' he continues: — 

* What 's become of all the goli/ 
Used to hang and brush their bosoms ' — 

not ' all the blue ' or ' all the brown,' 
though some of us, it is true, are con- 
demned to wear our hair brown or blue- 
black. But such are only unhappy excep- 
tions. Yellow or gold is the rule. The 
bravest men and the fairest women have 
had golden hair, and, we may add, in ref- 
erence to another distinction of the colour 
we are celebrating, golden hearts. Hair 
at the present time is doing its best to con- 
form to its normal conditions of colour. 
Numerous instances might be adduced of 



92 x^^ROSE FANCIES 

its changing from black to gold, in obedi- 
ence to chemical law. ' Peroxide of hy- 
drogen ! ' says the cynic. ' Beauty ! ' says 
the lover of art. 

And it might be argued, in a world of 
inevitable compromise, that the damage 
done to the physical health and texture of 
the hair thus playing the chameleon may 
well be overbalanced by the happiness, 
and consequent increased effectiveness, of 
the person thus dyeing for the sake of 
beauty. Thaumaturgists lay much stress 
on the mystic influence of colours ; and 
v/ho knows but that if we were only 
allowed to dye our hair what color we 
chose, we might be different men and 
• women. Strange things are told of worrten 
who have dyed their hair the color of 
blood or of wine, and we know from 
Christina Rossetti that golden hair is nego- 
tiable in fairyland — 

* "You have much gold upon your head," 

They answered all together ; 

'* Buy from us with a golden curl." ' 

Whether Laura could have done busi- 
ness with the goblin merchantmen with 
an oxidized curl is a difficult point, for 



PROSE FANCIES 



93 



fairies have sharp eyes ; and though it 
be impossible for a mortal to tell the real 
gold from the false gold hair, the fairies 
may be able to do so, and might reject the 
curl as counterfeit. 

Again, if in the vegetable world green 
almost universally colours the leaves, yel- 
low has more to do with the flowers. The 
flowers we love best are yellow : the cow- 
slip, the dafix)dil, the crocus, the butter- 
cup, half the daisy, the honey-suckle, and 
the loveliest rose. Yellow, too, has its 
turn even with the L. ves ; and what an 
artist he shows himself when, in autumn, 
he ' lays his fiery finger ' upon them, light- 
ing up the forlorn woodland with splashes 
— pure palette-colour of audacious gold ! 
He hangs the mulberry with heart-shaped 
yellow shields — which reminds one of 
the heraldic importance of ' or ' — and he 
lines the banks of the Seine with phan- 
tasmal yellow poplars. And other leaves 
still dearer to the heart are yellow like- 
wise ; leaves of those sweet old poets 
whose thoughts seem to have turned the 
pages gold. Let us dream of this : a 
maid v\^ith yellow hair, clad in a yellow 



94 PROSE FANCIES 

gown, seated in a yellow room, at the 
window a yellow sunset, in the grate a 
yellow fire, at her side a yellow lamplight, 
on her knee a Yellow Book. And the 
letters we love best to read — when we 
dare — are they not yellow, too ? No 
doubt some disagreeable things are reported 
of yellow. We have had the yellow- 
fever, and we have had pea-soup. The 
eyes of lions are said to be yellow, and the 
ugliest cats — the cats that infest one's 
garden — are always yellow. Some med- 
icines are yellow, and no doubt there are 
many other yellow disagreeables ; but we 
prefer to dwell upon the yellow blessings. 
I had almost forgotten that the gayest 
wines are yellow. Nor has religion for- 
gotten yellow. It is to be hoped yel- 
low will not forget religion. The sacred 
robe of the second greatest religion of the 
world is yellow, ' the yellow robe ' of the 
Buddhist friar ; and when the sacred har- 
lots of Hindustan walk in lovely proces- 
sion through the streets, they, too, like 
the friars, are clad in yellow. Amber is 
yellow ; so is the orange ; and so were 
stage-coaches and many dashing things of 



PROSE FANCIES 95 

the old time ; and pink is yellow by lamp- 
light. But gold-mines, it has been proved, 
are not so yellow as is popularly supposed. 
Hymen's robe is Miltonically ' saffron,' 
and the dearest petticoat in all literature 
• — not forgetting the ' tempestuous ' gar- 
ment of Herrick's Julia — was 'yaller.' 
Yes! 

* 'Er petticoat was yaller an' 'er little cap was green, 
An 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat, jes' the same as Thee- 
baw's Queen.' 

Is it possible to say anything prettier 
for yellow than that ? 



PROSE FANCIES — IX 

LETTER TO AN UNSUCCESS- 
FUL LITERARY MAN 



MY DEAR SIR: — I agree with 
every word you say. You have 
my entire sympathy. The world 
is indeed hard, hard to the sad — particu- 
larly hard to the unsuccessful. A sure 
five hundred a year covers a multitude of 
sorrows. It is ever an ill wind for the 
shorn lamb. If it be true that nothing 
succeeds like success, it is no less sadly 
true that nothing fails like failure. And 
when one thinks of it, it is only natural, 
for every failure is an obstruction in the 
stream of life. Metaphorical writers are 
fond of saying that the successful ride to 
success on the back of the failures. It is 
true that many rise on stepping-stones of 
their dead relations — but that is because 
their relations have been financial suc- 
cesses. In trut' , instead of the failure 
making the fortune of the successful, it is 
96 



PROSE FANCIES 97 

just the reverse. A very successful man 
would be the more successful were it 
not for the failures — on whom he has 
either to spend his money to support, or 
his time to advise. The strong are said 
to be impatient towards the weak — and 
is it to be wondered at, in a world where 
even the strongest need all their strength, 
in a sea where the best swimmer needs all 
his wind and muscle and skill to keep 
afloat? If success is sometimes 'unfeel- 
ing' towards failure, failure is often unfair 
to success. Of course, 'it is He that 
hath made us and not we ourselves,' but 
that is a text that cuts both ways ; and 
when all is said and done, the failure de- 
tracts from the force in the universe; he 
is the clog on the wheel of fortune. To 
say that the successful man benefits by 
the failure of others is as true as it would 
be to say that the ratepayer benefits by 
the poor rates. You use the word ' charla- 
tan' somewhat profusely, of several suc- 
cessful writers, and no doubt you are right. 
But you must remember that it is a favour- 
ite charge against the gifted and the for- 
tunate. Because we have failed by fair 



98 PROSE FANCIES 

means, we are sure the other fellows have 
succeeded by foul. And, moreover, one is 
apt to forget how much talent is needed 
to be a charlatan. Never look down 
upon a charlatan. Courage, skill, per- 
sonal force or charm, great knowledge of 
human nature, dramatic instinct, and in- 
dustry — few charlatans succeed (and no 
one is called a charlatan till he ^oes suc- 
ceed, be his success as low or high as you 
please) without possessing a majority of 
these qualities ; how many of which — it 
would be interesting to know — do you 
possess ? 

Indeed, it would seem to need more 
gifts to be a rogue than an honest man, 
and there is a sense in which every great 
man may be described as a charlatan — 
plus greatness ; greatness being an almost 
indefinable quality, a quality, at any rate, 
on which there is a bewildering diversity 
of opinion. 

You seem a little cross with publishers 
and editors. They have not proved the 
distinguished, briUiant, and sympathetic 
beings you imagined them in your boyish 
dreams. No doubt, publishers and editors 



PROSE FANCIES 99 

enter hardly into the kingdom of heaven. 
But then, you see, they don't care so 
much about that ; they are much more 
interested in the next election at certain 
fashionable clubs. It is really a little hard 
on them that they should suffer from the 
ignorant misconception of the literary 
amateur. It is only those who have had 
no dealings u'ith them who would be un- 
fair enough to expect publishers or editors 
to be literary men. They are business 
men — business men par excellence — and 
a good thing, too, for their papers and 
their authors. You lament their merce- 
nary view of life; but, judging by your 
letter, even you are not disposed to regard 
money as the root of all evil. 

You cannot understand why you have 
failed where others have succeeded. You 
have far more Greek than Keats, more 
history than Scott, and you know nineteen 
languages — ten of them to speak. With 
so many accomplishments, it must indeed 
be hard to fail — though you do not seem 
to have found it difficult. You have 
travelled, too — have been twice round the 
world, and have a thorough knowledge of 

L Of C. 



100 PROSE FANCIES 

the worst hotels. Certainly, it is singular. 
Nevertheless, I must confess that the 
dullest men I have ever met have been 
professors of history ; the worst poets have 
not only known Greek, but French as 
well ; and, generally speaking, the most 
tiresome of my acquaintances have more 
degrees than I have Latin to name 
them in. Alas ! it is not experience, or 
travel, or language, but the use we make 
of them, that makes literary success, 
which, one may add, is particularly de- 
pendent — perhaps not unnaturally — on 
the use we make of language. A book may 
be a book, although there is neither Latin 
nor Greek, nor travel, nor experience — in 
fact 'nothing' in it; and though, like my- 
self, you may pay an Oxford professor a 
thousand a year to correct your proofs, you 
may still miss immortality. 

To these intellectual and general equip- 
ments you add goodness of heart, sincerity 
of conviction, and martyrdom for your 
opinions ; you are, it would seem, like 
many others of us, the best fellow and 
greatest man of your acquaintance. Permit 
me to remind you that we are not talking 



PROSE F ANCIE S loi 

of goodness of heart, of strength or beauty 
of character, but of success, which is a thing 
apart, a fine art in itself. 

You confess that you are somewhat un- 
practical : you expect others — hard-worked 
journalists who never met you — to tell you 
what to read, how to form your style ! and 
how 'to get into the magazines.* You 
are, you say, with something of pride, but 
a poor business man. That is a pity, for 
nearly every successful literary man of 
the day, and particularly the novelists, 
are excellent business men. Indeed, 
the history of literature all round has 
proved that the men who have been 
masters of words have also been masters 
of things — masters of the facts of life for 
which those words stand. Many writers 
have mismanaged their affairs from idleness 
and indifference, but few from incapacity. 
Leigh Hunt boasted that he could never 
master the multiplication table. Perhaps 
that accounts for his comparative failure 
as a writer. Incompetence in one art is 
far from being a guarantee of competency 
in another, and a man is all the more 
likely to make a name if he is able to 



102 PROSE FANCIES 

make a living — though, judging from 
Coleridge, it seems a good plan to let 
another hard-worked man support one's 
wife and children. On the other hand, 
though business faculty is a great deal, it 
is not everything : for a man may be as 
punctual and methodical as Southey, and 
yet miss the prize of his high calling, or 
as generally 'impossible' as Blake, and 
yet win his place among the immortals. 

In fact, after all, success in literature has 
something to do with writing. In tem- 
porary success, industry and business fac- 
ulty, and an unworked field — be it Scot- 
land, Ireland, or the Isle of Man (any 
place but plain England!) — are the chief 
factors. For that more lasting success 
which we call fame other qualities are 
needed, such qualities as imagination, 
fancy, and magic and force in the use of 
words. Can you honestly say, O beloved, 
though tiresome, correspondent, that these 
great gifts are yours ? Judging from your 
letter — but Heaven forbid that I should 
be unkind ! For, need I say I love you 
with a fellow-feeling ? Do you think that 
vou are the only unappreciated genius on the 



PROSE FANCIES 103 

planet — not to speak of all the other un- 
appreciated geniuses on all the other planets. 
Thank goodness, the postal arrangements 
with the latter are a? yet defective ! Others 
there are with hearts as warm, minds as 
profound, and style at least as attractive, 
who languish in unmerited neglect. Mil- 
tons inglorious indeed, though far from 
mute. 

Believe me, you are not alone. In 
fact, there are so many like you that it 
would be quite easy for you to find society 
without worrying me. And for all of us, 
there is the consolation that, though we 
fail as writers, we may still succeed as 
citizens, as husbands and fathers and 
friends. As Whitman would say — be- 
cause you are not Editor of The Times do 
you give in that you are less than a man ? 
There are poets that have never entered 
into the Bodley Head, and great prose 
writers who have never sat in an editorial 
chair. Be satisfied with your heavenly 
crov/ns, O you whining unsuccessful, and 
leave to your inferiors the earthly five- 
shilling pieces. 



PROSE FANCIES — X 

A POET IN THE 
CITY 



* In the midway of this our mortal life, 
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.' 

I (AND when I say I, I must be 
understood to be speaking dramatic- 
ally) only venture into the City once 
a year, for the very pleasant purpose of 
drawing that twelve-pound-ten by which 
the English nation, ever so generously 
sensitive to the necessities, not to say 
luxuries of the artist, endeavours to ex- 
press its pride and delight in me. It 
would be a very graceful exercise of grati- 
tude for me here to stop and parenthesise 
the reader on the subject of all that twelve- 
pound-ten has been to me, how it has quite 
changed the course of my life, given me 
that long-desired opportunity of doing my 
best work in peace, for which so often I 
vainly sighed in Fleet Street, and even 
allowed me an indulgence in minor luxuries 
104. 



PROSE FANCIES 105 

which I could not have dreamed of enjoy- 
ing before the days of that twelve-pound- 
ten. Now not only peace and plenty, but 
leisure and luxury are mine. There is 
nothing goes so far as — Government 
money. 

Usually on these literally State occa- 
sions, I drive up in state, that is, in a 
hansom. There is only one other day in 
the year on which I am so splendid, but 
that is another beautiful story. It, too, is 
a day and an hour too joyous to be ap- 
proached otherwise than on winged wheels, 
too stately to be approached in merely 
pedestrian fashion. To go on foot to draw 
one's pension seems a sort of slight on the 
great nation that does one honour, as 
though a Lord Mayor should make his 
appearance in the procession in his office 
coat. 

So I say it is my custom to go gaily, 
and withal stately, to meet my twelve- 
pound-ten in a hansom. For many reasons 
the occasion always seems something of an 
adventure, and I confess I always feel a 
little excited about it — indeed, to tell the 
truth, a little nervous. As I glide along 



io6 PROSE FANCIES 

in my state barge (which seems a much 
more proper and impressive image for a 
hansom than ' gondola,' with its remin- 
iscences of Earl's Court) I feel like some 
fragile country flower torn from its roots, 
and bewilderingly hurried along upon the 
turbid, swollen stream of London life. 

The stream glides sweetly with a pleas- 
ant trotting tinkle of bells by the green park- 
side of Piccadilly, and sweet is it to hear 
the sirens singing,and to see them combing 
their gilded locks, on the yellow sands of 
Piccadilly Circus — so called, no doubt, 
from the number of horses and the skill of 
their drivers. Here are the whirling pools 
of pleasure, merry wheels of laughing 
waters, where your hansom glides along 
with a golden ease — it is only when you 
enter the First Cataract of the Strand that 
you become aware of the far-distant terri- 
ble roar of the Falls ! They are yet nearly 
two miles away, but already, like Niagara, 
thou hearest the sound thereof — the fateful 
sound of that human Niagara, where all 
the great rivers of London converge : the 
dark, strong floods surging out from the 
gloomy fastnesses of the East End, the 



PROSE FANCIES 107 

quick-running streams from the palaces of 
the West, the East with its waggons, the 
West with its hansoms, the four winds 
with their omnibuses, the horses and car- 
riages under the earth jetting up their 
companies of grimy passengers, the very 
air busy with a million errands. 

You are in the rapids — metaphorically 
speaking — as you crawl down Cheapside, 
and here where the Bank of England and 
the Mansion House rise sheer and awful 
from, shall we say, this boiling cauldron, 
this 'hell' of angry meeting waters — 
Threadneedle Street and Cornhill, Queen 
Victoria Street and Cheapside, each ' run- 
ning,' again metaphorically, ' like a mill 
race' — here in this wild maelstrom of 
human life and human conveyances, here 
is the true ' Niagara in London,' here are 
the most wonderful falls in the world — 
the London Falls. 

' Yes ! ' I said softly to myself, and I 
could see the sly, sad smile on the face of 
the dead poet, at the thought of whose 
serene wisdom a silence like snow seemed 
momentarily to cover up the turmoil — 
'Yes!' I said softlv, ' there is still the 



io8 PROSE FANCIES 

same old crush at the corner of Fenchurch 
street ! * 

By this time I had disbursed one of my 
two annual cab fares, and was standing a 
little forlorn at that very corner. It was 
a March afternoon, bitter and gloomy; 
lamps were already popping alight in a 
desolate way, and the east wind whistled 
mournfully through the ribs of the passers- 
by. A very unflower-like man was de- 
jectedly calling out ' daffadowndillies' close 
by. The sound of the pretty old word, 
thus quaintly spoken, brightened the air 
better than the electric lights which sud- 
denly shot rows of wintry moonlight along 
the streets. I bought a bunch of the poor, 
pinched flowers, and asked the man how 
he came to call them ' daffadowndillies.' 

' D'vunshur,' he said, in anything but a 
Devonshire accent, and then the east wind 
took him and he was gone — doubtless to 
a neighbouring tavern ; and no wonder, 
poor soul. Flowers certainly fall into 
strange hands here in London. 

Well, it was nearing four, and if I 
wanted a grateful country's twelve-pound- 
ten, I must make haste ; so presently I 



PROSE FANCIES 109 

found myself in a great hall, of which I 
have no clearer impression than that there 
were soft little lights all about me, and a 
soft chime of falling gold, like the rippling 
of Pactolus. I have a sort of idea, too, 
of a great number of young men with 
most beautiful moustaches, playing with 
golden shovels; and as I thus stood 
among the soft lights and listened to the 
most beautiful sound in the world, I 
thought that thus must Danae have felt 
as she stood amid the falling shower. But 
I took care to see that my twelve sover- 
eigns and a half were right number and 
weight for all that. 

Once more in the street, I lingered 
awhile to take a last look at the Falls. 
What a masterful alien life it all seemed 
to me. No single personality could hope 
to stand alone amid all that stress of pon- 
derous, bullying forces. Only public com- 
panies, and such great impersonalities, could 
hope to hold their own, to swim in such a 
whirlpool — and even they, I had heard it 
whispered far away in my quiet starlit gar- 
ret, sometimes went down. ' How,' I 
cried, ' would — 



no PROSE FANCIES 

*. . . my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in your 
deeps and heights . 
Rush of suns, and roll of systems, and your fiery 
clash of meteorites,' 



again quoting poetry. I always quote 
poetry in the City, as a protest — more- 
over, it clears the air. 

The more people buffeted against me 
the more I felt the crushing sense of 
almost cosmic forces. Everybody u^as so 
plainly an atom in a public company, a 
drop of water in a tyrannous stream of 
human energy — companies that cared 
nothing for their individual atoms, streams 
that cared nothing for their component 
drops ; such atoms and drops, for the most 
part, to be had for thirty shillings a week. 
These people about me seemed no more 
like individual men and women than indi- 
vidual puffs in a mighty rushing wind, or 
the notes in a great scheme of music, are 
men and v/omen — to the banker so many 
pens with ears whereon to perch them, to 
the capitalist so many ' hands,' and to the 
City man generally so many ' helpless 
pieces of the game he plays ' up there in 
spidery nooks and corners of the City. 



PROSE FANCIES iii 

As I listened to the throbbing of the 
great human engines in the buildings 
about me, a rising and a falling there 
seemed as of those great steel-limbed 
monsters, weird contortionists of metal, 
that jet up and down, and writhe and 
wrestle this way and that, behind the long 
glass windows of great water-towers, or 
toil like Vulcan in the bowels of mighty 
ships. An expression of frenzy seems to 
come up even from the dumb tossing steel, 
sometimes it seems to be shaking great 
knuckled fists at one and brandishing 
threatening arms, as it strains and sweats 
beneath the lash of the compulsive steam. 
As one watches it, there seems something 
of human agony about its panic-stricken 
labours, and something like a sense of pity 
surprises one — a sense of pity that any- 
thing in the world should have to work 
like that, even steel, even, as we say, 
senseless steel. What, then, of these 
great human engine-houses ! Will the 
engines always consent to rise and fall, 
night and day, like that ? or will there 
some day be a mighty convulsion, and 
this blind Samson of labour pull down the 



112 PROSE FANCIES 

whole engine-house upon his oppressors? 
Who knows? These are questions for 
great politicians and thinkers to decide, 
not for a poet, who is too much terrified 
by such forces to be able calmly to esti- 
mate and prophesy concerning them. 

Yes ! if you want to realise Tennyson's 
picture of 'one poor poet's scroll' ruling 
the world, take your poet's scroll down to 
Fenchurch street and try it there. Ah, 
what a powerless little ' private interest' 
seems poetry there, poetry 'whose action 
is no stronger than a flower.' In days of 
peace it ventures even into the morning 
papers, but, let only a rumour of war be 
heard, and it vanishes like a dream on 
doomsday morning. A County Council 
election passeth over it and it is gone. 

Yet it was near this very spot that 
Keats dug up the buried beauty of Greece, 
lying hidden beneath Finsbury Pavement! 
and in the deserted City churches great 
dramatists lie about us. Maybe I have 
wronged the City — and at this thought I 
remembered a little bookshop but a few 
yards away, blossoming like a rose right 
in the heart of the wilderness. 



PROSE FANCIES 113 

Here, after all, in spite of all my whirl- 
pools and engine-houses, was for me the 
greatest danger in the City. Need I say, 
therefore, that I promptly sought it, hov- 
ered about it a moment — and entered. 
How much of that grateful governmental 
twelve-pound-ten came out alive, I dare 
not tell my dearest friend. 

At all events I came out somehow re- 
assured, more rich in faith. There was a 
might of poesy after all. There were 
words in the little yellow-leaved garland, 
nestling like a bird in my hand, that would 
outlast the bank yonder, and outlive us all. 
I held it up. How tiny it seemed, how 
frail amid all this stone and iron. A mere 
flower — a flower from the seventeenth 
century — long-lived for a flower ! Yes, 
an immortelle. 



PROSE FANCIES — XI 

BROWN ROSES. 

fc \ A /"ELL, I never thought to see 

V V this day, sir,' said Gibbs, with 

something hke tears in his 

voice, as he reluctantly plied his scissors 

upon Hyacinth Rondel's distinguished 

curls. 

' Nor I, Gibbs — nor I ! ' said Rondel, 
sadly, relapsing into silence again, with his 
head meekly bent over the white sheet 
spread to catch his shorn beauty. 

' To think of the times, sir, that I have 
dressed your head,' continued Gibbs, 
whose grief bore so marked an emphasis, 
* and to think that after to-day . . .' 

' But you forget, my dear Gibbs, that I 
shall now be a more constant customer 
than ever ! ' 

' Ah, sir, but that will be different. It 
will be mere machine-cutting, lawn-mow- 
ing, steam-reaping — if you understand me 
— there'll be no pleasure in it — no artis- 
tic pleasure, I mean.' 
114 



PROSE FANCIES 115 

' Yes, Gibbs, and you are an artist — I 
have often told ■ on that.' 

' Ah, sir, but I am coming to the con- 
clusion that it is better not to be an artist 

— better to be bom just like every one 
else. In these days one suffers too much. 
Why, sir, I have n't in the whole of my 
business six heads like yours, and I go on 
cutting all the rest, week in and week out, 
just for the pleasure of dressing those six 

— and now there '11 only be five.' 

* * * 

' It looks like a winding-sheet,' mused 
Rondel presently, after a long silence, 
broken only by the soft crunch and click 
of the fatal scissors, as they feasted on the 
beautiful brown silk. 

' It do, indeed, sir,' said Gibbs, with a 
shudder, as another little o-lobe of golden 
brown rolled down into Rondel's lap. 

' Poor brown roses ! ' sighed the poet, 
after another silence; 'they are just like 
brown roses, are n't they, Gibbs ? ' 

' They are, indeed, sir.' 

' Brown roses scatterea over the wind- 
ing-sheet of one's youth — .h, Gibbs .? ' 

'They are, indeed, sir!' 



ii6 PROSE FANCIES 

' That 's rather a pretty image, don't 
you think, Gibbs ? ' 

' Indeed, I do, sir ! * 

' Well, well, they have bloomed their 
last; and when Juliet's white hands come 
seeking with their silver fingers white 
maidens lost in the brown enchanted for- 
est, there will not be a rose left for her to 
gather.' 

' Believe me, sir; I would more gladly 
have cut off your head than your hair — 
that is, figuratively speaking,' sobbed the 
artist-in-hair-oils. 

' Yes, my head would hardly be missed, 
you are quite right, Gibbs ; but my hair ! 
What will they do without it at first nights 
and private views ? It was worth five 
shillings a week to many a poor paragraph- 
writer. Well, I must try and make up 
for it by my beard ! ' 

' Your beard, sir ? ' exclaimed Gibbs in 
horror. 

' Yes, Gibbs, for some years I have 
been a Nazarene, that is, a Nazarite, for 
the top half of my head ; now I am going 
to chano^e about, and be a Nazarite with 
the lower. The razor has kissed my 



PROSE FANCIES 117 

cheeks and my chin and the fluted column 
of my throat for the last time.' 

' You cannot mean it, sir,' said Gibbs, 
suspending his murderous task a moment. 

' It 's quite true, Gibbs.* 

' Does she wish that, too, sir ? ' 

'Yes, that, too.' 

' Well, sir, I have heard of men making 
sacrifices for their wives, but of all the 
cruel . . .' 

' Please don't, Gibbs, it does no good. 
And Mrs. Rondel's motive is a good one.' 

' Of course, sir. I cannot presume — 
and yet, if it would n't be presuming, I 
should like to know why you are making 
this great, I may say this noble, sacrifice.' 

'Well, Gibbs, we're old friends, and 
I '11 tell you some day, but I hardly feel 
up to it to-day.' 

' Of course not, sir — of course not ; it 's 
only natural,' said Gibbs tenderly, while 
the scissors once more took up the con- 
versation. 



PROSE FANCIES — XII 

THE DONKEY THAT LOVED 
A STAR 

¥ 

• ^T^HAT is how the donkey tells his 

X love ! ' I said one day, with intent 
to be funny, as the prolonged 
love-whoop of a distant donkey was heard 
in the land. 

' Do n't be too ready to laugh at don- 
keys,' said my friend. 

' For,' he continued, ' even donkeys 
have their dreams. Perhaps, indeed, the 
most beautiful dreams are dreamed by 
donkeys.' 

' Indeed,' I said, ' and now that I think 
of it, I remember to have said that most 
dreamers are donkeys, though I never ex- 
pected so scientific a corroboration of a 
fleeting jest.' 

Now, my friend is an eminent scientist 
and poet in one, a serious combination, 
and he took my remarks with seriousness 
at once scientific and poetic. 
ii8 



PROSE FANCIES 119 

' Yes/ he went on, ' that is where you 
clever people make a mistake. You think 
that because a donkey has only two vowel 
sounds wherewith to express his emotions, 
he has no emotions to express. But let 
me tell you, sir . . .' 

But here we both burst out laughing — 
' You Golden Ass ! ' I said, ' take a 
munch of these roses ; perhaps they will 
restore you.' 

' No,' he resumed, ' I am quite serious. 
I have for many years past made a study 
of donkeys — high-stepping critics call it 
the study of Human Nature — however, 
it 's the same thing — and I must say that 
the more I study them the more I love 
them. There is nothing so well worth 
studying as the misunderstood, for the very 
reason that everybody thinks he under- 
stands it. Now, to take another instance, 
most people think they have said the last 
word on a goose when they have called it 
"a goose!" — but let me tell you, 
sir . . .' 

But here again we burst out laughing — 

'Dear goose of the golden eggs,' I said, 

vray leave to discourse on geese to-night 



I20 PROSE FANCIES 

— though lovely and pleasant would the 
discourse be — to-night I am all agog for 
donkeys.' 

' So be it,' said my friend, ' and if that 
be so, I cannot do better than tell you the 
story of the donkey that loved a star — 
keeping for another day the no less fascin- 
ating story of the goose that loved an 
angel.' 

By this time I was, appropriately, all ears. 

' Well,' he once more began, ' there 
was once a donkey, quite an intimate 
friend of mine, and I have no friend of 
whom I am prouder, who was unpracti- 
cally fond of looking up at the stars. He 
could go a whole day without thistles, if 
night would only bring him stars. Of 
course he suffered no little from his fellow 
donkeys for this curious passion of his. 
They said well that it did not become 
him, for indeed it was no little laugh- 
able to see him gazing so sentimentally at 
the remote and pitiless heavens. Donkeys 
who belonged to Shakespeare societies re- 
called the fate of Bottom, the donkey who 
had loved a fairy, but our donkey paid 
little heed. There is perhaps only one 



PROSE FANCIES 121 

advantage in being a donkey — namely, a 
hide impervious to criticism. In our 
donkey's case it was rather a dream that 
made him forget his hide — a dream that 
drew up all the sensitiveness from every 
part, from hoof, and hide, and ears, so that 
all the feeling in his whole body was cen- 
tred in his eyes and brain, and those, as 
we have said, were centred on a star. He 
took it for granted that his fellows should 
sneer and kick out at him ; it was ever so 
with genius among the donkeys, and he 
had very soon grown used to these atten- 
tions of his brethren, which were powerless 
to withdraw his gaze from the star he 
loved. For though he loved all the stars, 
as every individual man loves all women, 
there was one star he loved more than any 
other; and standing one midnight among 
his thistles, he prayed a prayer, a prayer 
that some day it might be granted him to 
carry that star upon his back, — which, 
he recalled, had been sanctified by the 
holy sign, — were it but for ever so short 
a journey. Just to carry it a little way, 
and then to die. This to him was a 
dream beyond the dreams of donkeys. 



122 PROSE FANCIES 

' Now, one night,' continued my friend, 
taking breath for himself and me, ' our 
poor donkey looked up to the sky, and lo ! 
the star was nowhere to be seen. He 
had heard it said that stars sometimes fall. 
Evidently his star had fallen. Fallen ! 
but what if it had fallen upon the earth ? 
Being a donkey, the wildest dreams seemed 
possible to him. And, strange as it may 
seem, there came a day when a poet came 
to his master and bought our donkey to 
carry his little child. Now, the very first 
day he had her upon his back, the donkey 
knew that his prayer had been answered, 
and that the little swaddled babe he carried 
was the star he had prayed for. And, 
indeed, so it was; for so long as donkeys 
ask no more than to fetch and carry for 
their beloved, they may be sure of beauty 
upon their backs. Now, so long as this 
little girl that was a star remained a little 
girl, our donkey was happy. For many 
pretty years she would kiss his ugly muzzle 
and feed his mouth with sugar — and thus 
our donkey's thoughts sweetened day by 
day, till from a natural pessimist he blos- 
somed into a perfectly absurd optimist, and 



PROSE FANCIES 123 

dreamed the donkiest of dreams. But, 
one day, as he carried the girl who was 
really a star through the spring lanes, a 
young man walked beside her, and though 
our donkey thought very little of his talk 

— in fact, felt his plain "hee-haw" to be 
worth all its smart chirping and twittering 

— yet it evidently pleased the maiden. It 
included quite a number of vowel-sounds, 
though if the maiden had only known, it 
did n't mean half so much as the donkey's 
plain monotonous declaration. 

' Well, our donkey soon began to realise 
that his dream was nearing its end ; and, 
indeed, one day his little mistress came 
bringing him the sweetest of kisses, the 
very best sugar in the very best shops, but 
for all that our donkey knew that it meant 
good-bye. It is the charming manner of 
English girls to be at their sweetest when 
they say good-bye. 

' Our dreamer-donkey went into exile 
as servant to a woodcutter, and his life was 
lenient if dull, for the woodcutter had no 
sticks to waste upon his back ; and next 
day his young mistress who was once a 
star took a pony for her love, whom some 



124 PROSE FANCIES | 

time after she discarded for a talented 
hunter, and, one fine day, like many of her 
sex, she pitched her affections upon a 
man — he too being a talented hunter. To 
their wedding came all the countryside. 
And with the countryside came the don- 
key. He carried a great bundle of fire- 
wood for the servants' hall, and as he waited 
outside, gazing up at his old loves the stars, 
while his master drank deeper and deeper 
within, he revolved many thoughts. But 
he is only known to have made one remark 
— in the nature, one may think, of a grim 
jest — 

' " After all !' he was heard to say, " she 
has married a donkey, after all." 

' No doubt it was feeble ; but then our 
donkey was growing old and bitter, and 
hope deferred had made him a cynic' 



PROSE FANCIES—XIII 

ON LOVING one's 
E N E M I E " 



S 



LIKE all people who live apart from 
it, the Founder of the Christian re- 
ligion was possessed of a profound 
knowledge of the world. As, according 
to che proverb, the woodlander sees noth- 
ing of the wood for its trees, so those 
who live in the world know nothing of 
it. They know its gaudy, glittering sur- 
face, its Crystal Palace fireworks, and the 
paste-diamonds with which it bedecks 
itself; they know its music halls and its 
night clubs, its Piccadillies and its politics, 
its restaurants and its salons ; but of the 
bad — or good? — heart of it all they 
know nothing. In more meanings than 
one, it takes a saint to catch a sinner ; 
and Christ certainly knew as well as saved 
the sinner. 

But none of His precepts show a truer 
knowledge of life and its conditions than 

125 



126 PROSE FANCIES 

His commandment that we should love 
our enemies. He realised — can we doubt ? 
— that without enemies the Church He 
bade His followers build could not hope 
to be established. He knew that the 
spiritual fire he strove to kindle would 
spread but little unless the four winds of 
the world blew against it. Well, indeed, 
may the Christian Church love its enemies, 
for it is they who have made it. 

Indeed, for a man, or a cause, that 
wants to get on, there is nothing like a few 
hearty, zealous enemies. Most of us 
would never be heard of if it were not for 
our enemies. The unsuccessful man 
counts up his friends, but the successful man 
numbers his enemies. A friend of mine 
was lamenting, the other day, that he 
could not find twelve people to disbelieve 
in him. He had been seeking them for 
years, he sighed, and could not get be- 
yond eleven. But, even so, with only 
eleven he was a very successful man. In 
these kind-hearted days enemies are be- 
coming so rare that one has to go out of 
one's way to make them. The true in- 
terpretation, therefore, of the easiest of 



PROSE FANCIES 127 

the commandments is — make your ene- 
mies, and your enemies will make you. 

So soon as the armed men begin to 
spring up in our fields, we may be sure 
that we have not sown in vain. 

Properly understood, an enemy is but a 
negative embodiment of our personalities 
or ideas. He is an involuntary witness to 
our vitality. Much as he despises us, 
greatly as he may injure us, he is none the 
less a creature of our making. It was we 
who put into him the breath of his malig- 
nity, and inspired the activity of his malice. 
Therefore, with his very existence so 
tremendous a tribute, we can afford to 
smile at his self-conscious disclaimers of 
our significance. Though he slay us, we 
made him — to ' make an enemy,' is not 
that the phrase ? 

Indeed, the fact that he is our enemy is 
his one rahon d^ctre. That alone should 
make us charitable to him. Live and let 
live. Without us our enemy has no oc- 
cupation, for to hate us is his profession. 
Think of his wives and families ! 

The friendship of the little for the great 
is an old-established profession ; there is but 



128 PROSE FANCIES 

one older — namely, the hatred of the little 
for the great; and, though it is perhaps 
less officially recognized, it is without 
doubt the more lucrative. It is one of 
the shortest roads to fame. Why is the 
name of Pontius Pilate an uneasy ghost of 
history ? Think what fame it would have 
meant to be an enemy of Socrates or 
Shakespeare ! Blackwood* s Magazine and 
The Quarterly Review only survive to-day 
because they once did their best to strangle 
the genius of Keats and Tennyson. Two 
or three journals of our own time, by the 
same unfailing method, seek that circula- 
tion from posterity which is denied them in 
the present. 

This is particularly true in literature, 
where the literary enemy is as organized a 
tradesman as the literary agent. Like the 
literary agent, he naturally does his best to 
secure the biggest men. No doubt the 
time will come when the literary cut-throat 
— shall we call him ? — will publish dainty 
little books of testimonials from authors, 
full of effusive gratitude for the manner in 
which they have been slashed and blud- 
geoned into fame. ' Butcher to Mr. Grant 



PROSE FANCIES 129 

Allen ' may then become a familiar legend 
over literary shop-fronts : — 

* Ah ! did you stab at Shelley's heart 
With silly sneer and cruel lie ? 
And Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Keats, 
To murder did you nobly try ? 

You failed, 'tis true ; but what of that ? 

The world remembers still your name — 
'Tis tame, for yozi, to be the cur 

That barks behind the heels of Fame.' 

Any one who is fortunate enough to 
have enemies will know that all this is far 
from being fanciful. If one*s enemies 
have any other raison d'etre beyond the 
fact of their being our enemies — what is 
it t They are neither beautiful nor clever, 
wise nor good, famous, nor, indeed, passa- 
bly distinguished. Were they any of 
these, they would not have taken to so 
humble a means of getting their living. 
Instead of being our enemies, they could 
then have afforded to employ enemies on 
their own account. Who, indeed, are our 
enemies? Broadly speaking, they are all 
those people who lack what we possess. 

If you are rich, every poor man is 
necessarily your enemy. If you are beau- 



130 PROSE FANCIES 

tiful, the great democracy of the plain and 
ugly will mock you in the streets. 

It will be the same with everything you 
possess. The brainless will never forgive 
you for possessing brains, the weak will 
hate you for your strength, and the evil for 
your good heart. If you can write, all 
the bad writers are at once your foes. If 
you can paint, the bad painters will talk 
you down. But more than any talent 
or charm you may possess, the pearl of 
price for which you will be most bitterly 
hated will be your success. You can be 
the most wonderful person that ever ex- 
isted so long as you don't succeed, and 
nobody will mind. ' It is the sunshine,' 
says some one, 'that brings out the adder.* 
So powerful, indeed, is success that it has 
been known to turn a friend into a foe. 
Those, then, who wish to engage a few 
trusty enemies out of place need only 
advertise among the unsuccessful. 

P.S. — For one service we should be 
particularly thankful to our enemies — they 
save us so much in stimulants. Their 
unbelief so helps our belief, their nega- 
tives make us so positive. . 



PROSE FANCIES— XIV 

THE DRAMATIC ART 
OF LIFE. 

¥ 

IT is a curious truth that, whereas in 
every other art deliberate choice of 

method and careful calculation of effect 
are expected from the artist, in the greatest 
and most difficult art of all, the art of life, 
this is not so. In literature, painting, or 
sculpture you first evolve your conception, 
and then after long study of it, as it 
glows and shimmers in your imagination, 
you set about the reverent selection of 
that form which shall be its most truthful 
incarnation, in words, in paint, in marble. 
Now life, as has been said many times, is 
an art too. Sententious morality from 
time past has told us that we are each 
given a part to play, evidently implying, 
with involuntary cynicism, that the art of 
life is — the art of acting. 

As with the actor, we are each given 
a certain dramatic conception for the ex- 

13- 



132 PROSE FANCIES 

pression of which we have precisely the 
same artistic materials — namely, our own 
bodies, sometimes including heart and 
brains. One has often heard the com- 
plaint of a certain actor that he acts him- 
self. On the metaphorical stage of life 
the complaint and the implied demand are 
just the reverse. How much more in- 
teresting life would be if only more people 
had the courage and skill to act themselves, 
instead of abjectly understudying some one 
else. Of course, there are supers on the 
stage of life as on the real stage. It is 
proper that these should dress and speak 
and think alike. These one courteously 
excepts from the generalisation that the 
composer of the play, as Marcus Aurelius 
calls him, has given each of us a certain 
part to play — that part simply oneself: a 
part, need one say, by no means as easy as 
it seems ; a part most difficult to study, 
and requiring daily rehearsal. So difficult 
is it, indeed, that most people throw up the 
part, and join the ranks of the supers — 
who, curiously enough, are paid much 
more handsomely than the principals. 
They enter one of the learned or idle pro- 



PROSE FANCIES 133 

fessions, join the army or take to trade, 
and so speedily rid themselves of the irk- 
some necessity of being anything more 
individual than ' the learned counsel,' 
' the learned judge,* ' my lord bishop,' or 
'the colonel,' names impersonal in applica- 
tion as the dignity of 'Pharaoh,' w^hereof 
the name and not the man was alone im- 
portant. Henceforth they are the Church, 
the Law^, the Army, the City, or that 
vaguer profession. Society. Entering one 
of these, they become as lost to the really 
living world as the monk who voluntarily 
surrenders all will and character of his 
own at the threshold of his monastery : 
bricks in a prison wall, privates in the line, 
peas in a row. But, as I say, these are 
the parts that pay. For playing the others, 
indeed, you are not paid, but expected to 
pay — dearly. 

It is full time we turned to those on 
whom falls the burden of those real parts. 
Such, when quite young, if they be con- 
scientious artists, will carefully consider 
themselves, their gifts and possibilities, 
study to discover their artistic raison d'etre 
and how best to fulfil it. He or she will 



134 PROSE FANCIES 

say : Here am I, a creature of great gifts 
and exquisite sensibilities, drawn by great 
dreams, and vibrating to great emotions ; 
yet this potent and exquisite self is as yet, 
I know, but unwrought material of the 
perfect work of art it is intended that I 
should make of it — but the marble where- 
from, with patient chisel, I must liberate 
the perfect and triumphant Me ! As a 
poet listening with trembling ear to the 
voice of his inspiration, so I tremulously 
ask myself — what is the divine concep- 
tion that is to become embodied in me, 
what is the divine meaning of Me ? How 
best shall I express it in look, in word, in 
deed, till my outer self becomes the truth- 
ful symbol of my inner self — till, in fact, 
I have successfully placed the best of my- 
self on the outside — for others besides 
myself to see, and know and love ? 

What is my part, and how am I to 
play it ? 

Returning to the latter image, there are 
two difficulties that beset one in playing a 
part on the stage of life, right at the out- 
set. You are not allowed to Mook ' it, or 
'dress' it! What would an actor think, 



PROSE FANCIES 135 

who, asked to play Hamlet, found that he 
would be expected to play it without make- 
up and in nineteenth century costume ? 
Yet many of us are in a like dilemma with 
similar parts. Actors and audience must 
all wear the same drab clothes and the 
same immobile expression. It is in vain 
you protest that you do not really belong 
to this absurd and vulgar nineteenth cen- 
tury, that you have been spirited into it 
by a cruel mistake, that you really belong 
to mediaeval Florence, to Elizabethan, 
Caroline, or at latest Queen Anne Eng- 
land, and that you would like to be allowed 
to look and dress as like it as possible. It 
is no use ; if you dare to look or dress like 
anything but your own tradesmen — and 
other critics — it is at your peril. If you 
are beautiful you are expected to disguise 
a fact that is an open insult to every other 
person you look at ; and you must, as a 
general rule, never look, wear, feel, or say 
what everybody else is not also looking, 
wearing, feeling, or saying. 

Thus you get some hint of the difficulty 
of playing the part of yourself on this 
stage of life. 



136 PROSE FANCIES 

In these matters of dressing and look- 
ing your part musicians seemed granted an 
immunity denied to all their fellow-artists. 
Perhaps it is taken for granted that the 
musician is a fool — the British public is 
so intuitive. Yet it takes the same view 
of the poet — without allowing him a like 
immunity. And, by the way, what a fine 
conception of his part had Tennyson : of 
the dignity, the mystery, the picturesque- 
ness of it. Tennyson would have felt it 
an artistic crime to look like his publisher; 
yet what poet is there left us to-day half 
so distinguished-looking as his publisher? 

Indeed, curiously enough, among no 
set of men does the desire to look as com- 
monplace as the rest of the world seem so 
strong as among men of letters. Perhaps 
it is out of consideration for the rest of 
the world ; but whatever the reason, im- 
mobility of expression and general medi- 
ocrity of style are more characteristic of 
them at present then even the military. 

It is surely a strange paradox that we 
should pride ourselves on schooling to 
foolish insensibility, on eliminating from 
them every mark of individual character, 



PROSE FANCIES 137 

the faces that were intended subtly and 
eloquently to image our moods — to look 
glad when we are glad, sorry when we are 
sorry, angry in anger, and lovely in love. 

The impassivity of the modern young 
man is indeed a weird and wonderful 
thing. Is it a mark to hide from us the 
appalling sins he none the less openly 
affects ? Is it meant to conceal that once 
in his life he paid a wild visit to 'The 
Empire' — by kind indulgence of the 
County Council ? that he once chucked 
a barmaid under the chin, that he once 
nearly got drunk, that he once spoke to a 
young lady he did not know — and then 
ran away.? 

One sighs for the young men of the 
days of Gautier and Hugo, the young men 
with red waistcoats who made asses of 
themselves at first nights and on the barri- 
cades, young men with romance in their 
hearts and passion in their blood, fear- 
lessly sentimental and picturesquely every- 
thing. 

The lover then was not ashamed that 
you should catch radiant glimpses of his 
love in his eyes — nay ! if you smiled 



138 PROSE FANCIES 

kindly on him, he would take you by the 
arm and insist on you breaking a bottle 
with him in honour of his mistress. Joy 
and sorrow then wore their appropriate 
colours, according, so to say, to the 
natural sumptuary laws of the emotions — 
one of which is that the right place for the 
heart is the sleeve. 

It is the duty of those who are great, or 
to whom great destinies of joy or sorrow 
have been dealt, to wear their distinctions 
for the world to see. It is good for the 
world, which, in its crude way, indicates 
the rudiments of this dramatic art of life, 
when it decrees that the bride shall walk 
radiant in orange blossom, and the mourner 
sadden our streets with black — symbols 
ever passing before us of the moving vicis- 
situdes of life. 

The mourner cannot always be sad, or 
the bride merry ; the bride indeed some- 
times weeps at the altar, and the mourner 
laughs a savage cynical laugh at the grave ; 
but for those moments in which they 
awhile forget parts more important than 
themselves, the tailor and the dressmaker 
have provided symbolical garments, just as 



PROSE FANCIES 139 

military decorations have been provided 
for heroes without the gift of looking 
heroic, and sacerdotal vestments for the 
priest, vi^ho, like a policeman, is not 
always on duty. 

In playing his part the conscientious art- 
ist in life, like any other actor, must often 
seem to feel more than he really feels at a 
given moment, say more than he means. 
In this he is far from being insincere — 
though he must make up his mind to be 
accused daily of insincerity and affecta- 
tion. On the contrary, it will be his very 
sincerity that necessitates his make-believe. 
With his great part ever before him in its 
inspiring completeness, he must be care- 
ful to allow no merely personal accident 
of momentary feeling or action to jeopard- 
ize the general effect. There are mo- 
ments, for example, when a really true 
lover, owing to such masterful natural 
facts as indigestion, a cold, or extreme 
sleepiness, is unable to feel all that he 
knows he really feels. To 'tell the truth,* 
as it is called, under such circumstances, 
would simply be a most dangerous form of 
lying. There is no duty we owe to truth 



140 PROSE FANCIES 

more imperative than that of lying stoutly 
on occasion — for, indeed, there is often no 
other way of conveying the vi^hole truth 
than by telling the part-lie. 

A watchful sincerity to our great con- 
ception of ourselves is the first and last 
condition of our creating that finest work 
of art — a personality; for a personality, 
like a poet, is not only born, but made. 



PROSE FANCIES— XV 

THE ARBITRARY CLASSIFI- 
CATION OF SEX. 



IN an essay on Vauvenargues Mr. John 
Morley speaks with characteristic caus- 
ticity of those epigrammatists ' who 
persist in thinking of man and woman as 
two different species,' and who make ver- 
bal capital out of the fancied distinction in 
the form of smart epigrams beginning *-Les 
femmesJ* It is one of Shakespeare's car- 
dinal characteristics that he understood 
woman. Mr. Meredith's fame as a novel- 
ist is largely due to the fact that he, too, 
understands women. The one spot on the 
sun of Robert Louis Stevenson's fame, so 
we are told, is that he could never draw a 
woman. His capacity for drawing men 
counted for nothing, apparently, beside 
this failure. Evidently the Sphinx has not 
the face of a woman for nothing. That 
is why no one has read her riddle, trans- 
lated her mystic smile. Yet many people 
141 



142 PROSE FANCIES 

smile mysteriously, without any profound 
meanings behind their smile, with no other 
reason than a desire to mystify. Perhaps 
the Sphinx smiles to herself just for the 
fun of seeing us take her smile so seriously. 
And surely women must so smile as they 
hear their psychology so gravely discussed. 
Of course, the superstition is invaluable to 
them, and it is only natural that they 
should make the most of it. Man is sup- 
posed to be a complete ignoramus in re- 
gard to all the specialised female ' depart- 
ments ' — from the supreme mystery of 
the female heart to the humble domestic 
mysteries of a household. Similarly, men 
are supposed to have no taste in women's 
dress, yet for whom do women clothe 
themselves in the rainbow and the sea- 
foam, if not to please men ? And was not 
the high-priest of that delicious and fas- 
cinating mystery a man — if it be proper to 
call the late M. Worth a man — as the 
best cooks are men, and the best waiters ? 
It would seem to be assumed from all 
this mystification that men are beings clear 
as daylight, both to themselves and to 
women. Poor, simple, manageable souls, 



PROSE FANCIES 143 

their wants are easily satisfied, their psy- 
chology — which, it is implied, differs little 
from their physiology — long since mapped 
out. 

It may be so, but it is the opinion of 
some that men's simplicity is no less a 
fiction than women's mysterious complex- 
ity, and that human character is made up 
of much the same qualities in men and 
women, irrespective of a merely rudimen- 
tary sexual distinction, which has, of 
course, its proper importance, and which 
the present writer would be the last to wish 
away. From that quaint distinction of 
sex springs, of course, all that makes life 
in the smallest degree worth living, from 
great religions to tiny flowers. Love and 
beauty and poetry, Shakespeare's plays, 
Burne-Jones's pictures, and Wagner's 
operas — all such moving expressions of 
human life, as science has shown us, spring 
from the all-important fact that ' male 
and female created He them.' 

This everybody knows, and few are fool 
enough to deny. Many people, however, 
confuse this organic distinction of sex with 
its time-worn conventional symbols ; just 



144 PROSE FANCIES 

as religion is commonly confused with its 
external rites and ceremonies. The com- 
parison naturally continues itself further ; 
for, as in religion, so soon as some tradi- 
tional garment of the faith has become out- 
worn or otherwise unsuitable, and the pro- 
posal is made to dispense with or substitute 
it, an outcry immediately is raised that re- 
ligion itself is in danger — so with sex, no 
sooner does one or the other sex propoi^e 
to discard its arbitrary conventional char- 
acteristics, or to supplement them by oth- 
ers borrowed from its fellow-sex, than an 
outcry immediately is raised that sex itself 
is in danger. 

Sex — the most potent force in the uni- 
verse — in danger because women wear 
knickerbockers instead of petticoats, or 
military men take to corsets and cosmetics ! 

That parallel with religion may be pur- 
sued profitably one step further. In 
religion, the conventional test of your 
faith is, not how you live, not in your 
kindness of heart or purity of mind, but 
how you believe — in the Trinity, in the 
Atonement ; and do you turn to the East 
during the recital of the Apostles' Creed ? 



PROSE FANCIES 145 

These and such, as every one knows, are 
the vital matters of religion. And it is 
even so w^ith sex. You are not asked for 
the realities of manliness or womanliness, 
but for the shadows, the arbitrary exter- 
nalities, the fashions of which change from 
generation to generation. 

To be truly womanly, you must never 
wear your hair short ; to be truly manly, 
you must never wear it long. To be 
truly womanly, you must dress as daintily 
as possible, however uncomfortably ; to be 
truly manly, you must wear the most hide- 
ous gear ever invented by the servility of 
tailors — a strange succession of cylinders 
from head to heel ; cylinder on head, 
cylinder round your body, cylinders on 
arms and cylinders on legs. To be truly 
womanly, you must be shrinking and cling- 
ing in manner and trivial in conversation, 
you must have no ideas and rejoice that 
you wish for none; you must thank Heaven 
that you have never ridden a bicycle or 
smoked a cigarette ; and you must be 
prepared to do a thousand other absurd 
and ridiculous things. To be truly manly, 
you must be and do the opposite of all 



146 PROSE FANCIES 

these things, with this exception — that 
with you the possession of ideas is optional. 
The finest specimens of British manhood 
are without ideas, but that, I say, is, gen- 
erally speaking, a matter for yourself. It 
is indeed the only matter in which you 
have any choice. More important matters, 
such as the cut of your clothes and hair, 
the shape of your face, the length of your 
moustache and the pattern of your cane — 
all these are very properly regulated for 
you by laws of fashion, which you could 
never dream of breaking. You may break 
every moral law there is — or rather, was 
— and still remain a man. You may be a 
bully, a cad, a coward and a fool, in the 
poor heart and brains of you ; but so long 
as you wear the mock regimentals of con- 
temporary manhood, and are above all 
things plain and undistinguished enough, 
your reputation for manhood will be se- 
cure. There is nothing so dangerous to a 
reputation for manhood as brains or beauty. 
In short, to be a true woman you have 
only to be pretty and an idiot, and to be a 
true man you have only to be brutal and 
a fool. 



PROSE FANCIES 147 

From these misconceptions of manliness 
and womanliness, these superstitions of 
sex, many curious confusions have come 
about. The, so to say, professional differ- 
entiation between the sexes had at one 
time gone so far that men were credited 
with the entire monopoly of a certain set 
of human qualities, and women with the 
monopoly of a certain other set of human 
qualities ; yet every one of these are qual- 
ities which one would have thought were 
proper to, and necessary for, all human 
beings alike, male and female. 

In a dictionary of a date (1856) when 
everything on earth and in heaven was 
settled and written in penny cyclopedias 
and books of deportment, I find these de- 
licious definitions : — 

Manly : becoming a man ; firm ; brave; 
undaunted \ dignified ; noble ; stately ; not 
boyish or womanish. 

Womanly : becoming a woman \ femi- 
nine ; as womanly behaviour. 

Under Woman we find the adjectives 
— soft, mild, pitiful and flexible, kind, 
civil, obliging, humane, tender, timorous, 
modest. 



148 PROSE FANCIES 

Who can doubt that the dictionary 
maker defined and distributed his adjec- 
tives aright for the year 1856? Since 
then, however, many alarming heresies 
have taken root in our land, and some are 
heard to declare that both these sets of 
adjectives apply to men and women alike, 
and are, in fact, necessities of any decent 
human outfit. Otherwise the conclusion 
is obvious, that no one desirous of the 
adjective 'manly' must ever be — soft, 
mild, pitiful and flexible, kind, civil, 
obliging, humane, tender, timorous, or 
modest j and no one desirous of the ad- 
jective 'womanly' — be firm, brave, un- 
daunted, dignified, noble, or stately. 

But surely the essentials of 'manliness ' 
and ' womanliness ' belong to man and 
woman alike — the externals are purely 
artistic considerations, and subject to the 
vagaries of fashion. In art no one would 
think of allowing fashion any serious 
artistic opinion. It is usually the art 
which is out of fashion that is most truly 
art. Similarly, fashions in manliness or 
womanliness have nothing to do with real 
manliness or womanliness. Moreover, 



1 



PROSE FANCIES 149 

the adjectives ' manly ' or ' womanly,' ap- 
plied to works of art, or the artistic sur- 
faces of men and women, are irrelevant — 
that is to say, impertinent. You have 
no right to ask a poem or a picture to look 
manly or womanly, any more than you have 
any right to ask a man or a woman to look 
manly or womanly. There is no such 
thing as looking manly or womanly. There 
is looking beautiful or ugly, distinguished 
or commonplace, individual or insignifi- 
cant. The one law of externals is beauty 
in all its various manifestations. To ask 
the sex of a beautiful person is as absurd 
as it would be to ask the publisher the 
sex of a beautiful book. Such questions 
are for midwives and doctors. 

It was once the fashion for heroes to 
shed tears on the smallest occasion, and 
it does not appear that they fought the 
worse for it ; some of the firmest, bravest, 
most undaunted, most dignified, most no- 
ble, most stately human beings have been 
women ; as some of the softest, mildest, 
most pitiful and flexible, most kind, civil, 
obliging, humane, tender, timorous and 
modest human beings have been men. 



150 PROSE FANCIES 

Indeed, some of the bravest men that ever 
trod this planet have worn corsets, and it 
needs more courage nou^adays for a man 
to w^ear his hair long than to machine-gun 
a whole African nation. Moreover, quite 
the nicest women one knows ride bicycles 
— in the rational costume. 



PROSE FANCIES — XVI 



THE FALLACY OF 
NATION 



IT IS, I am given to understand, a 
familiar axiom of mathematics that 
no number of ciphers placed in front 
of significant units, or tens or hun- 
dreds of units, adds in the smallest de- 
gree to the numerical value of those 
units. The figure one becomes of no 
more importance however many noughts 
are marshalled in front of it — though, in- 
deed, in the mathematics of human nature 
this is not so. Is not a man or woman 
considered great in proportion to the num- 
ber of ciphers that walk in front of him, 
from a humble brace of domestics to 
guards of honour and imperial armies ? 

A parallel profound truth of mathemat- 
ics is, that a nought, however many times 
it be multiplied, remains nought ; but 
again we find the reverse obtain in the 
mathematics of human nature. One 

151 



152 PROSE FANCIES 

might have supposed that the result of one 
nobody multiplied even fifty million times 
w^ould still be nobody. However, such is 
far from being the case. Fifty million 
nobodies make — a nation. Of course, 
there is no need for so many. I am reck- 
oning as a British subject, and speak of 
fifty million merely as an illustration of 
the general fact that it is the multiplication 
of nobodies that makes a nation. ' Increase 
and multiply ' was, it will be remembered, 
the recipe for the Jewish nation. 

Nobodies of the same colour, tongue, 
and prejudices have but to congregate to- 
gether in a crowd sufficiently big for other 
similar crowds to recognise them, and then 
they are given a name of their own, and 
become recognised as a nation — one of 
the ' Great Powers.' 

Beyond those differences in colour, 
tongue, and prejudices, there is really no 
difference between the component units — 
or rather ciphers — of all these several na- 
tional crowds. You have seen a proces- 
sion of various trades-unions filing toward 
Hyde Park, each section with its particu- 
lar banner of a strange device : ' the United 



PROSE FANCIES 153 

Guild of Paperhangers,' ' the Ancient 
Order of Plumbers,' and so on. And you 
may have marvelled to notice how alike 
the members of the various carefully dif- 
ferentiated companies were. So to say, 
they each and all might have been plumb- 
ers ; and you could n't help feeling that it 
would n't have mattered much if some of 
the paperhangers had by mistake got walk- 
ing amongst the plumbers, or vice versa. 

So the great trades-unions of the world 
file past, one with the odd word ' Russia ' 
on its banner ; another boasting itself 
'Germany' — this with a particularly 
bumptious and self-important young man 
walking backward in front of it, in the 
manner of a Salvation Army captain, and 
imperiously waving an iron wand ; still 
another ' nation ' calling itself ' France ' ; 
and yet another, boasting the biggest brass 
band, and called ' England.' Other 
smaller bodies of nobodies, that is, smaller 
nations, file past with humbler tread — 
though there is really no need for their 
doing so. For, as we have said, they are 
in every particular like to those haughtier 
nations who take precedence of them. In 



154 PROSE FANCIES 

fact, one or two of them, such as Norway 
and Denmark — were a truer system of 
human mathematics to obtain — are really 
of more importance than the so-called 
greater nations, in that among their no- 
bodies they include a larger percentage of 
intellectual somebodies. 

Remembering that percentage of wise 
men, the formula of a nation were perhaps 
more truly stated in our first mathematical 
image. The wise men in a nation are as 
the units with the noughts in front of 
them. And when I say wise men I do 
not, indeed, mean merely the literary men 
or the artists, but all those somebodies 
with some real force of character, people 
with brains and hearts, fighters and lovers, 
saints and thinkers, and the patient indus- 
trious workers. Such, if you consider, 
are really no integral part of the nation 
among which they are cast. They have 
no part in what are grandiloquently called 
national interests — war, politics, and 
horse-racing to wit. A change of Govern- 
ment leaves them as unmoved as an elec- 
tion for the board of guardians. They 
would as soon think of entering Parliament 



PROSE FANCIES 155 

or the County Council, as of yearning to 
manage the gasworks, or to go about with 
one of those carts bearing the legend 
'Aldermen and Burgesses of the City of 
London ' conspicuously upon its front. 
Their main concern in political changes is 
the rise and fall of the income tax, and, be 
the Cabinet Tory or Liberal, their rate 
papers come in for the same amount. It 
is likely that national changes would affect 
them but little more. What more would 
a foreign invasion mean than that we 
should pay our taxes to French, Russian, 
or German officials, instead of to English 
ones ? French and Italians do our cook- 
ing, Germans manage our music, Jews 
control our money markets ; surely it 
would make little difference to us for 
France, Russia, or Germany to undertake 
our government. The worst of being 
conquered by Russia would be the neces- 
sity of learning Russian ; whereas a little 
rubbing up of our French would make us 
comfortable with France. Besides, to be 
conquered by France would save us cross- 
ing the Channel to Paris, and then we 
might hope for cafes in Regent Street, and 



156 PROSE FANCIES 

an emancipated literature. As a matter of 
fact, so-called national interests are merely 
certain private interests on a large scale, 
the private interests of financiers, ambitious 
politicians, soldiers and great merchants. 
Broadly speaking, there are no rival nations 
— there are rival markets ; and it is its 
Board of Trade and its Stock Exchange 
rather than its Houses of Parliament that 
virtually govern a country. Thus one 
seaport goes down and another comes up, 
industries forsake one country to bless 
another, the military and naval strengths 
of nations fluctuate this way and thatj and 
to those whom these changes affect they 
are undoubtedly important matters — the 
great capitalist, the soldier, and the politi- 
cian ; but to the quiet man at home with 
his wife, his children, his books, and his 
flowers, to the artist busied with brave 
translunary matters, to the saint with his 
eyes filled with ' the white radiance of 
eternity,' to the shepherd on the hillside, 
the milkmaid in love, or the angler at his 
sport — what are these pompous commo- 
tions, these busy, bustling mimicries of 
reality ? England will be just as good to 



PROSE FANCIES 157 

live in though men some day call her 
France. Let the big busybodies divide her 
amongst them as they like, so that they 
leave one alone with one's fair share of 
the sky and the grass, and an occasional, not 
too vociferous, nightingale. 

The reader will perhaps forgive the 
hackneyed references to Sir Thomas 
Browne peacefully writing his Religio 
Medici amid all the commotions of the 
Civil War, and to Gautier calmly correct- 
ing the proofs of his new poems during 
the siege of Paris. The milkman goes 
his rounds amid the crash of empires. It 
is not his business to fight. His business 
is to distribute his milk — as much after 
half-past seven as may be inconvenient. 
Similarly, the business of the thinker is 
with his thought, the poet with his poetry. 
It is the business of politicians to make 
national quarrels, and the business of the 
soldier to fight them. But as for the poet 
— let him correct his proofs, or beware the 
printer. 

The idea, then, of a nation, is a grandilo- 
quent fallacy in the interests of commerce 
and ambition, political and military. All 



158 PROSE FANCIES 

the great and good, clever and charming 
people belong to one secret nation, for 
which there is no name unless it be the 
Chosen People. These are the lost tribes 
of love, art, and religion, lost and swamped 
amid alien peoples, but ever dreaming of a 
time when they shall meet once more in 
Jerusalem. 

Yet though they are thus aliens, taking 
and wishing no part in the organization of 
the ' nations ' among which they dwell, 
this does not prevent those nations taking 
part and credit in them. And whenever a 
brave soldier wins a battle, or an intrepid 
traveller discovers a new land, his par- 
ticular nation flatters itself as though it — 
the million nobodies — had done it. With 
a profound indifference to, indeed an active 
dislike of, art and poetry, there is nothing 
on which a nation prides itself so much as 
upon its artists and poets, whom, invariably, 
it starves, neglects, and even insults, as 
long as it is not too silly to do so. 

Thus the average Englishman talks of 
Shakespeare — as though he himself had 
written the plays; of India — as though 
he himself had conquered it. And thus 



PROSE FANCIES 159 

grow up such fictions as ' national great- 
ness ' and ' public opinion.' 

For what is ' national greatness ' but the 
glory reflected from the memories of a few 
great individuals ? and what is ' public 
opinion ' but the blustering echoes of the 
opinion of a few clever young men on the 
morning papers ? 

For how can people in themselves little 
become great by merely congregating into 
a crowd, however large ? And surely 
fools do not become wise, or worth listen- 
ing to, merely by the fact of their banding 
together. 

A ' public opinion' on any matter except 
foot-ball, prize-fighting, and perhaps cricket, 
is merely ridiculous — by whatever brutal 
physical powers it may be enforced — 
ridiculous as a town council's opinion upon 
art ; and a nation is merely a big fool with 
an army. 



PROSE FANCIES— XVII 

THE GREATNESS OF 

MAN 



IGNORANT, as I inevitably am, dear 
reader, of your intellectual and spirit- 
ual upbringing, I can hardly guess 
whether the title of my article vi^ill impress 
you as a platitude or as a paradox. Good- 
ness knows, some men and women think 
quite enough of themselves as it is, and, 
from a certain momentary point of view, 
there may seem little occasion indeed to 
remind man of his importance. 

I refer to your intellectual and spiritual 
upbringing, because I venture to wonder 
if it was in the least like my own. I was 
brought up, I rejoice to say, in the bosom 
of an orthodox Puritan family. I hope 
that family rejoices too. I was led and 
driven to believe that man was everybody, 
and that God was somebody — and that 
not merely the Sabbath, but the whole 
universe, was made for man : that the 
1 60 



PROSE FANCIES i6i 

stars were his bed-time candles, and that 
the sun arose to ensure his catching the 
8.37 of a morning. 

On this belief I acted for many years. 
Every young man believes that there is no 
god but God, and that he is born to be His 
prophet — though perhaps that belief is 
not so common nowadays. I am speaking 
of many years ago. 

Science, however, has long since 
changed all that. Those terrible Muses, 
geology, astronomy, and particularly biol- 
ogy, have reduced man to a humility 
which, if in some degree salutary, becomes 
in its excess highly dangerous. Why 
should one maggot in this great cheese of 
the world take itself more seriously than 
others ? Why dream mightily and do 
bravely if we are but a little higher than 
the beasts that perish ? Nature cares 
nothing about us, and her giant forces 
laugh at our fancies. The world has no 
such meaning as we thought. Poets and 
saints, deluded by unhealthy imaginations, 
have nlisled us, and it is quite likely that 
the wild waves are really saying nothing 
more important than ' Beecham's Pills.' 



i62 PROSE FANCIES 

' Give us a definition of life,' I asked a 
certain famous scientist and philosopher 
whom I am privileged to call my friend. 
' Nothing easier ! ' he gaily replied. ' Life 
is a product of solar energy, falling upon 
the carbon compounds, on the outer crust 
of a particular planet in a particular corner 
of the solar system.' 

'And that,' I said, ' really satisfies you 
as a definition of life — of all the wistful 
wonder of the world ! ' And as I spoke I 
thought of Moses with mystically shining 
face upon the Mount of the Law, of 
Ezekiel rapt in his divine fancies, of 
Socrates drinking his cup of hemlock, of 
Christ's agony in the garden ; the golden 
faces of the great of the world passed as in 
a dream before me, — soldiers, saints, 
poets, and lovers. I thought of Horatius 
on the bridge, of the holy and gentle soul 
of St. Francis, of Chatterton in his splen- 
did despair, and in fancy I went with the 
awe-struck citizens of Verona to rever- 
ently gaze at the bodies of two young 
lovers who had counted the world well 
lost if they might only leave it together. 

The carbon compounds ! 



PROSE FANCIES 163 

I took down Rofneo and 'Juliet^ listened 
to its passionate spheral music, and the 
carbon compounds have never troubled me 
again. 

Love laughs at the carbon compounds, 
and a great book, a noble act, a beautiful 
face, make nonsense of such cheap form- 
ulae for the mystery of human life. 

Yet this parable of the carbon com- 
pounds is a fair sample of all that science 
can tell us when we come to ultimates. We 
go away from its oracles with a mouthful of 
sounding words, which may seem very 
impressive till we examine their emptiness. 
What, for example, is all this rigmarole 
about solar energy and the carbon com- 
pounds but a more pompous way of put- 
ting the old scriptural statement that man 
was made of the dust of the ground ? To 
say that God took a handful of dust and 
breathed upon it and it became man, is no 
harder to realize than that solar rays fall- 
ing upon that dust should produce human- 
ity and all the various phantasmagoria of 
life. If anything, it is more explanatory. 
It leaves us with an inspiring mystery for 
explanation. 



i64 PROSE FANCIES 

In saying this, I do not forget our debt 
to science. It has done much in clearing 
our minds of cant, in popularising more 
systematic thinking, and in instituting 
sounder methods of observation. In some 
directions it has deepened our sense of 
wonder. It has broadened our conception 
of the universe, though I fear it has been 
at the expense of narrowing our concep- 
tion of man. With Hamlet it contemptu- 
ously says, ' What is this quintessence of 
dust ! ' It is so impressed by the mileage 
and tonnage of the universe, so abased 
before the stupendous measurements of the 
cosmos, the appalling infinity and eternity 
of its space and time, that it forgets the 
marvel of the mind that can grasp all 
these conceptions, forgets too that, big 
and bullying as the forces of nature may 
be, man has been able in a large measure 
to control, indeed to domesticate, them. 
Surely the original fact of lightning is little 
more marvellous than the power of man 
to turn it into his errand-boy or his horse, 
to light his rooms with it, and imprison it 
in pennyworths, like the genius in the 
bottle, in the underground railway. Mert 



PROSE FANCIES 165 

size seems unimpressive when we contem- 
plate such an extreme of littleness as say 
the ant, that pin-point of a personality, 
that mere speck of being, yet including 
within its infinitesimal proportions a clever 
busy brain, a soldier, a politician, and a 
merchant. That such and so many facul- 
ties should have room to operate within 
that tiny body — there is a marvel before 
which, it seems to me, the billions of miles 
that keep us from falling into the jaws of 
the sun, and the tonnage of Jupiter, are 
comparatively insignificant and conceiv- 
able. 

No, we must not allow ourselves to be 
frightened by the mere size and weight of 
the universe, or be depressed because our 
immediate genealogy is not considered 
aristocratic. Perhaps, after all, we are 
sons of God, and as Mr. Meredith finely 
puts it, our life here may still be 

* ... a little holding 
To do a mighty service.' 

' Things of a day ! ' exclaims Pindar. 
' What Is a man .? What is a man not ? ' 

It is good for our Nebuchadnezzars, the 
kings of the world, and conceited, success- 



i66 PROSE FANCIES 

fill people generally, to measure themselves 
against the great powers of the universe, to 
humble their pride by contemplation of the 
fixed stars ; but a too humble attitude 
toward the Infinite, a too constant ponder- 
ing upon eternity, is not good for us, un- 
less, so to say, we can live with them as 
friends, with the inspiring feeling that, 
little as we may seem, there is that in us 
which is no less infinite, no less cosmic, 
and that our passions and dreams have, as 
Mr. William Watson puts it, ' a relish of 
eternity.' 

Readers of Amiel's ' Journal ' will know 
what a sterilising, petrifying influence his 
trance-like contemplation of the Infinite 
had upon his life. Amiel was simply 
hypnotised by the universe, as a man may 
hypnotise himself by gazing fixedly at a 
star. 

Mr. Pater, you will remember, has a 
remarkable study of a similar temperament 
in his Imaginary Portraits. Sebastian van 
Storck, like Amiel, had become hypnotised 
by the Infinite. It paralysed in him all 
impulse or power 'to be or do any limited 
thing.' 



PROSE FANCIES 167 

' For Sebastian, at least,' we read, 'the 
world and the individual alike had been 
divested of all effective purpose. The 
most vivid of finite objects, the dramatic 
episodes of Dutch history, the brilliant per- 
sonalities which had found their parts to 
play in them, that golden art, surrounding 
one with an ideal world, beyond which 
the real world was discernible indeed, but 
etherealised by the medium through which 
it came to one ; all this, for most men so 
powerful a link to existence, only set him 
on the thought of escape — into a formless 
and nameless infinite world, evenly grey. 
Actually proud, at times, of his 
curious, well-reasoned nihilism, he could 
but regard what is called the business of 
life as no better than a trifling and weari- 
some delay.' 

This mood, once confined to a few 
mystics, is likely to become a common 
one, is already, one imagines, far from in- 
frequent — so the increase of suicide 
would lead us to suppose. Robbed of his 
hope of a glorious immortality, stripped of 
his spiritual significance, bullied and be- 
littled by science on every hand, man not 



i68 PROSE FANCIES 

unnaturally begins to feel that it it no use 
taking his life seriously, that, in fact, it 
betrays a lack of humour to do so. While 
he was a supernatural being, a son of God, 
it was with him a case of noblesse oblige ; 
and while he is happy and comfortable he 
does n't mind giving up the riddle of the 
world. It is only the unhappy that ever 
really think. But what *s he to do when 
agony and despair come upon him, when 
all that made his life worth living is taken 
from him ? How is he to sustain himself, 
where shall he look for his strength or his 
hope ? He looks up at the sky full of 
stars, but he is told that God is not there, 
that the city of God is long since a ruin, 
and that owls hoot to each other across 
its moss-grown fanes and battlements ; he 
looks down on the earth, full of graves, a 
vast necropolis of once radiant dreams, 
with the living for its phantoms — and 
there is no comfort anywhere. Happy is 
he if some simple human duty be at hand, 
which he may go on doing blindly and 
dumbly — till, perhaps, the light come 
again. It is difficult to offer comfort to 
such a one. Comfort is cheap, and we 



PROSE FANCIES 169 

know nothing. When life holds nothing 
for our love and delight, it is difficult to 
explain why we should go on living it — 
except on the assumption that it matters, 
that it is, in some mystical way, supremely 
important, how we live it — and what we 
make of those joys and sorrows, which, 
say some, are but meant as mystical trials 
and tests. 

Sebastian van Storck refused ' to be or 
do any limited thing,' but the answer to 
his mysticism is to be found in a finer 
mysticism, that which says that there is no 
limited act or thing, but that the signifi- 
cance, as well as the pathos, of eternity is 
in our smallest joys and sorrows, as in 
our most everyday transactions, and the 
greatness of God incarnate in His humblest 
child. 

This, the old doctrine of the micro- 
cosm, seems in certain moments, moments 
one would wish to say, of divination, 
strangely plain and clear — when, in Blake's 
words, it seems so easy to 

* . . . see a world in a grain of sand, 
And a heaven in a wild flower ; 
Hold infinity in the palrn of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour.' 



170 PROSE FANCIES 

Perhaps in the street, an effect of light, 
a passing face, yes, even the plaintive 
grind of a street organ, some such every- 
day circumstance, affects you suddenly in 
quite a strange v\^ay. It has become uni- 
versalised. It is no longer a detail of the 
Strand, but a cryptic symbol of human 
life. It has been transfigured into a thing 
of infinite pathos and infinite beauty, and, 
sad or glad, brings to you an inexplicable 
sense of peace, an unshakable conviction 
that man is a spirit, that his life is indeed 
of supreme and lovely significance, and 
that his destiny is secure and blessed. 

Matthevi^ Arnold, ever sensitive to such 
spiritual states, has described these trance- 
like visitations in ' The Buried Life ' : 

* Only, but this is rare — 

When a beloved hand is laid in ours, 

When, jaded with the rush and glare 

Of the interminable hours. 

Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear. 

When our world-deafen' d ear 

Is by the tones of a loved voice caress' d — 

A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, 

And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again : 

The eyes sink inward, and the heart lies plain. 

And what we mean, we say, and what we would, v/e know. 

A man becomes aware of his life's flow, 

And hears its winding murmur 5 and he sees 

The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze. 



PROSE FANCIES 171 

*And there arrives a lull in the hot race 
Wherein he doth forever chase 
That flying and elusive shadow, rest. 
An air of coolness plays upon his face, 
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast. 
And then he thinks he knows 
The hills where his life rose. 
And the sea where it goes.' 

' To be or do any limited thing' ! What, 
indeed, we ask in such hours, is a limited 
thing, when all the humble interests of 
our daily life are palpably big with eternity .? 
Is the first kiss of a great love a limited 
thing .? though there is, unhappily, no de- 
nying that it comes to an end ! When a 
young husband and wife smile across to 
each other above the sleep of their little 
child — is that a limited thing.? When 
the siren voices of the world blend together 
on the lips of a young poet, and with rapt 
eyes and hot heart he makes a song as 
of the morning stars — is that a limited 
thing ? Are love, and genius, and duty 
done in the face of death — are these lim- 
ited things.? I think not — and man, in- 
deed, knows better. 

Greatness is not relative. It is absolute. 
It is not for man to depress himself by 
measuring himself against the eternities and 



172 PROSE FANCIES 

the immensities external to him. What 
he has to do is to look inward upon him- 
self, to fathom the eternities and the 
immensities in his own heart and brain. 

And the more man sees himself forsaken 
by the universe, the more opportunity to 
vindicate his own greatness. Is there no 
kind heart beating through the scheme of 
things ? — man's heart shall still be kind. 
Will the eternal silence make mock of his 
dreams and his idealisms, laugh coldly at 
' the splendid purpose in .his eyes ' ? Well, 
so be it. His dreams and idealisms are 
none the less noble things, and if the gods 
do thus make mock of mortal joy and pain 
— let us be grateful that we were born 
mere men. 

Moreover, he has one great answer to 
the universe — the answer of courage. 
He is still Prometheus, and there is no 
limit to what he can bear. Let the vult- 
ures of pain rend his heart as they will, he 
can still hiss ' coward ' in the face of the 
Eternal. Nay, he can even laugh at his 
sufferings — thanks to the spirit of humour, 
that most blessed of ministering angels, 
without which surely the heart of humanity 



PROSE P^ANCIES 173 

had long since broken, by which man is 
able to look with a comical eye upon 
terrors, as it were taking themselves so 
seriously, coming with such Olympian 
thunders and lightnings to break the spirit 
of a mere six foot of earth ! 

But while his courage and his humour 
are defenses of which he cannot be 
disarmed, whatever be the intention of the 
Eternal, it is by no means certain that 
nature does not mean kindly by man. 
Perhaps the pain of the world is but the 
rough horseplay of great powers that mean 
but jest — and kill us in it: as though 
one played at ' tick ' with an elephant ! 

Perhaps, after all, who knows — God is 
love, and His great purpose kind. 

Surely, when you think of it, the exist- 
ence in man of the senses of love and pity 
implies the probability of their existence 
elsewhere in the universe. 

' Into that breast which brings the rose 
Shall I with shuddering fall . ' 

So runs the profoundest thought in 
modern poetry — and need I say it is Mr. 
Meredith's ? 

As the fragrance and colour of the rose 



174 PROSE FANCIES 

must in some occult way be properties of 
the rude earth from which they are drawn 
by the sun, may not human love also be 
a kindly property of matter — that myste- 
rious life-stuff in which is packed such 
marvellous potentialities ? Evidently love 
must be somewhere in the universe — 
else it had not got into the heart of man ; 
and perhaps pity slides down like an angel 
in the rays of the solar energy, while 
there is the potential beating of a human 
heart even in the hard crust of the carbon 
compounds. 

I confess that this seems to me no mere 
fancy, but a really comforting speculation. 
Pain, we say, is inherent in the scheme of 
the universe ; but is not love seen to be 
no less inherent, too ? 

There must be some soul of beauty to 
animate the lovely face of the world, some 
soul of goodness to account for its saints. 
If the gods are cruel, it is strange that man 
should be so kind, and that some pathetic 
spirit of tenderness should seem to stir 
even in the bosoms of beasts and birds. 

Meanwhile, we cannot too often insist 



PROSE FANCIES 175 

that, whatever uncertainties there be, man 
has one certainty — himself. Science has 
really adduced nothing essential against his 
significance. That he is not as big as an 
Alp, as heavy as a star, or as long-lived as 
an eagle, is nothing against his proper im- 
portance. Even a nobleman is of more 
significance in the world than his acres, 
and giants are not proverbial for their in- 
tellectual or spiritual qualities. The ant 
is of more importance than the ass, and 
the great eye of a beautiful woman is more 
significant than the whole clayey bulk of 
Mars. 

After all the scientific mockery of the 
old religious ideal of the importance of 
man, one begins to wonder if his Ptolemaic 
fancy that he was the centre of the uni- 
verse, and that it was all made for him, 
is not nearer the truth than the pitiless 
theories v/hich hardly allow him equality 
with the flea that perishes. 

Suppose if, after all, the stars were really 
meant as his bedtime candles, and the 
sun^s purpose in rising is really that he 
may catch the 8.37 ! 



176 PROSE FANCIES 

For, as Sir Thomas Browne says in his 
solemn English, ' there is surely a piece of 
Divinity in us, something that was before 
the elements, and owes no homage unto 
the sun.' 

The long winter of materialistic science 
seems to be breaking up, and the old ideals 
are seen trooping back with something 
more than their old beauty, in the new 
spiritual spring that seems to be moving in 
the hearts of men. 

After all its talk, science has done little 
more than correct the misprints of religion. 
Essentially, the old spiritualistic and poetic 
theories of life are seen, not merely weakly 
to satisfy the cravings of man's nature, but 
to be mostly in harmony with certain 
strange and moving facts in his constitu- 
tion, which the materialists unscientifically 
ignore. 

It was important, and has been helpful, 
to insist that man is an animal, but it is 
still more important to insist that he is a 
spirit as well. He is, so to say, an animal 
by accident, a spirit by birthright : and, 
however homely his duties may occasionally 



PROSE FANCIES 177 

seem, his life is bathed in the light of a 
sacred transfiguring significance, its smallest 
acts flash with divine meanings, its highest 
moments are rich with ' the pathos of 
eternity,' and its humblest duties mighty 
with the responsibilities of a god. 



PROSE FANCIES—XVIII 

DEATHAND TWO FRIENDS 

A DIALOGUE 

(To the memory of J. S. and T. C. L.) 

Persons: Scriptor and Lector.* 

LECTOR : But do you really mean, 
Scriptor, that you have no desire 
for the life after death ? 
Scriptor : I never said quite that, Lec- 
tor, though perhaps I might almost have 
gone so far. What I did say was that v/e 
have been accustomed to exaggerate its 
importance to us here and now, that it 
really matters less to us than we imagine. 
Lector : I see. But you must speak 
for yourself, Scriptor. I am sure that it 

* This dialogue was written originally as a rejoinder to 
certain criticisms on a book of mine entitled, The Re- 
ligion of a Literary Man — Religio Scrip/oris — 
hence the names given to the two ' persons.' It was 
written in March, 1894, before an event in the writer's 
life to which, erroneously, some have supposed it to refer. 

178 



PROSE FANCIES 179 

matters much to many, to most of us. It 
does, I know, to me. 

ScRiPTOR : Less than you think, my 
dear Lector. Besides, you are really too 
young to know. It is true that, as years 
go, you are ten years my senior, but what 
of that? You have that vigorous health 
which is the secret of perpetual youth. 
You have not yet realised decay, not to 
speak of death. The immortality of the 
soul is a question wide of you, who have 
as yet practically no doubt of the immor- 
tality of the body. But I — well, it would 
be melodramatic to say that I face death 
every day. The metaphor applies but to 
desperate callings and romantic complaints. 
To some Death comes like a footpad, sud- 
denly, and presents his pistol — and the 
smoke that curls upward from his empty 
barrel is your soul. 

To another he comes featureless, a 
stealthily accumulating London fog, that 
slowly, slowly chokes the life out of you, 
without allowing you the consolation of a 
single picturesque moment, a single grand 
attitude. For you, probably. Death will 
only come when you die. I have to live 



i8o PROSE FANCIES 

with him as well. I shall smoulder for 
years, you will be carried to heaven, like 
Enoch, in a beautiful lightning — 

' A simple child 
That lightly draws its breath, 
And feels its life in every limb, 
What can it know of death ? ' 

That 's you, my dear Lector, for all 
your forty years. 

Lector: All the more reason, Scriptor, 
that you should desire a hereafter. You 
sometimes talk of the work you would do, 
if you were a robust Philistine such as L 
Would it not be worth while to live again, 
if only to make sure of that magnum opus 
— just to realise those dreams that you 
say are daily escaping you ? 

Scriptor : Ah ! so speaks the energetic 
man, eager to take the world on his shoul- 
ders. I know the images of death that 
please you. Lector — such as that great 
one of Arnold's, about ^ the sounding 
labour-house vast of being.' 

But, Lector, you who love work so 
well — have you never heard tell of a 
thing called Rest ? Have you never 
known what it is to be tired, mv Lector ? 



PROSE FANCIES i8i 

— not tired at the end of a busy day, but 
tired in the mornings, tired in the Mem- 
nonian sunlight, when larks and barrel- 
organs start on their blithe Insistent 
rounds. No, the man who is tired of a 
morning sings not music-hall songs in his 
bedroom as he dashes about in his morn- 
ing bath. But will you never want to go 
to bed, Lector ? Will you be always like 
the children who hate to be sent to bed, 
and think that when they are grown up 
they will never go to bed at all ? Yet in 
a few years' time how glad they are of the 
stray chance of bed at ten. May it not be 
so with sleep's twin brother ? In our 
young vigour, driven by a hundred buoy- 
ant activities, enticed by dream on dream, 
time seems so short for all we think we 
have to do; but surely when the blood 
begins to thin, and the heart to wax less 
extravagantly buoyant, when comfort 
croons a kettle-song whose simple spell no 
sirens of ambition or romance can over- 
come — do n't you think that then ' bed- 
time ' will come to seem the best hour of 
the day, and ' Death as welcome as a friend 
would falP? 



i82 PROSE FANCIES 

Lector : But you are no fair judge, 
Scriptor. You say my health, my youth, 
as you waggishly call it, puts me out of 
court. Yet surely your ill-health and low 
spirits just as surely vitiate your judgment ? 

Scriptor : Admitted, so far as my views 
are the outcome of my particular condition. 
But you forget that the condition I have 
been supposing is not merely particular, 
but, on the contrary, the most general 
among men. Was it not old age ? — 
which, like youth, is independent of years. 
You may be young beyond your years, I 
may be old in advance of them ; but old 
age does come some time, and with it the 
desire of rest. 

Lector : But does not old age spend 
most of its thought in dwelling fondly on 
its lost youth, hanging like a remote sun- 
rise in its imagination ? Is it not its one 
yearning desire just to live certain hours of 
its youth over again ? — and would the old 
man not give all he possesses for the cer- 
tainty of being born young again into 
eternity ? 

Scriptor : He would give everything 
— but the certainty of rest. After sev- 



PROSE FANCIES 183 

enty years of ardent life one needs a long 
sleep to refresh us in. Besides, age may 
not be so sure of the advantages of youth. 
All is not youth that laughs and glitters. 
Youth has its hopes, which are uncertain ; 
but age has its memories, which are sure ; 
youth has its passions, but age has its com- 
forts. 

Lector : Your answers come gay and 
pat, Scriptor, but your voice betrays you. 
In spite of you, it saddens all your words. 
Tell me, have you ever known what it is 
actually to lose any one who is dear to you ? 
Have you looked on Death face to face ? 

Scriptor: Yes, Lector, I have — but 
once. It is now about five years ago, but 
the impression of it haunts me to this hour. 
Perhaps the memory is all the keener be- 
cause it was my one experience. In a 
world where custom stales all things, save 
Cleopatra, it is all the better, perhaps, not 
to see even too much of Death, lest we 
grow familiar with him. For instance, 
doctors and soldiers, who look on him 
daily, seem to lose the sense of his terror 
— nay, worse, of his tragedy. Maybe it 
is something in his favour, and Death, like 



i84 PROSE FANCIES 

others, may only need to be known to be 
loved. 

Lector : But tell me, Scriptor, of this 
sad experience, which, even now, it moves 
you to name ; or is the memory too sad 
to recall ? 

Scriptor : Sad enough, Lector, but 
beautiful for all that, beautiful as winter. 
It was winter when she of whom I am 
thinking died — a winter that seemed to 
make death itself whiter and colder on her 
marble forehead. It is but one sad little 
story of all the heaped-up sorrow of the 
world; but in it, as in a shell, I seem to hear 
the murmur of all the tides of tears that 
have surged about the lot of man from the 
beginning. 

There were two dear friends of mine 
whom I used to call the happiest lovers in 
the world. They had loved truly from 
girlhood and boyhood, and after some 
struggle — for they were not born into 
that class which is denied the luxury of 
struggle — at length saw a little home 
bright in front of them. And then Jenny, 
who had been ever bright and strong, sud- 
denly and unaccountably fell ill. Like 



PROSE FANCIES 185 

the stroke of a sword, like the stride of a 
giant, Death, to whom they had never 
given a thought, was upon them. It was 
consumption, and love could only watch 
and pray. Suddenly my friend sent for 
me, and I saw with my own eyes what, at 
a distance, it had seemed impossible to be- 
lieve. As I entered the house, with the 
fresh air still upon me, I spoke confidently, 
with babbling, ignorant tongue. ' Wait 
till you see her face ! ' was all my poor 
stricken friend could say. 

Ah ! her face ! How can I describe it ? 
It was much sweeter afterwards, but now 
it was so dark and witchlike, so uncanny, 
almost wicked, so thin and full of inky 
shadows. She sat up in her bed, a wizened 
little goblin, and laughed a queer, dry, 
knowing laugh to herself, a laugh like the 
scraping of reeds in a solitary place. A 
strange black weariness seemed to be 
crushing down her brows, like the ' un- 
willing sleep ' of a strong narcotic. She 
would begin a sentence and let it wither 
away unfinished, and point sadly and al- 
most humorously to her straight black 
hair, clammy as the feathers of a dead 



i86 PROSE FANCIES 

bird lying in the rain. Her hearing was 
strangely keen. And yet she did not 
know, was not to know. How was 
one to talk to her — talk of being well 
again, and books and country walks, 
when she had so plainly done with all 
these things ? How bear up when she, 
with a half-sad, half- amused smile 
showed her thin wrists ? — how say that 
they would soon be strong and round 
again ? Ugh ! she was already beginning 
to be different from us, already putting off 
our body-sweet mortality, and putting on 
the fearful garments of Death, changing be- 
fore our eyes from ruddy familiar humanity 
into a being of another element, an ele- 
ment we dread as the fish dreads the air. 
Soon we should not be able to talk to her. 
Soon she would have unlearnt all the 
sweet grammar of earth. She was no 
longer Jenny, but a fearful symbol of mys- 
teries at which the flesh crept. She was 
going to die. 

Have you never looked ahead toward 
some trial, some physical trial, maybe an 
operation ? — for perhaps the pains of the 
body are the keenest, after all — those of 



PROSE FANCIES 187 

the spirit are at least in some part meta- 
phor. You look forward with dread, yet 
it is at last over. It is behind you. And 
have you never thought that so it will be 
with death some day ? Poor little Jenny 
was to face the great operation. 

Next time I saw her she was dead. 
In our hateful English fashion, they had 
shut her up in a dark room, and we had to 
take candles to see her. I shall never 
forget the moment when my eyes first 
rested on that awful snow-white sheet, so 
faintly indented by the fragile form be- 
neath, lines very fragile, but oh ! so hard 
and cold, like the indentations upon frozen 
snow ; never forget my strange unaccount- 
able terror when he on one side and I on 
the other turned down the icy sheet from 
her face. But terror changed to awe and 
reverence, as her face came upon us with 
its sweet sphinx-like smile. Lying there, 
with . a little gold chain round her neck 
and a chrysanthemum in the bosom of her 
night-gown, there was a curious regality 
about her, a look as though she wore a 
crown our eyes were unable to see. And 
while I gazed upon her, the sobs of my 



i88 PROSE FANCIES 

friend came across the bed, and as he 
called to her I seemed to hear the eternal 
Orpheus calling for his lost Eurydice. 
Poor lad! — poor maid! Here, naked 
and terrible, was all the tragedy of the 
world compressed into an hour, the Me- 
dusa-face of life that turns the bravest to 
stone. Surely, I felt, God owed more than 
He could ever repay to these two lovers, 
whom it had been so easy to leave to 
their simple joys. And from that night 
to this I can never look upon my white 
bed without seeing afar off the moment 
when it, too, will bear the little figure of 
her I love best in the world, bound for her 
voyage to the Minotaur Death ; just as I 
never put off my clothes at night, and 
stretch my limbs down among the cool 
sheets, without thinking of the night when 
I shall put off my clothes for the last time 
and close my eyes for ever. 

Lector : But, my friend, this is to feel 
too much ; it is morbid. 

ScRiPTOR : Morbid ! How can one 
really feel and not be morbid ? If one be 
morbid, one can still be brave. 

Lector : But surely, true-lover as you 



PROSE FANCIES 189 

are, it would be a joy to you to think that 
this terrible parting of death will not be 
final. We cannot love so well without 
hoping that we may meet our loved ones 
somewhere after death. 

ScRiPTOR : Hopes ! wishes ! desires ! 
What of them ? We hope, we desire all 
things. Who has not cried for the moon 
in his time ? But what is the use of talk- 
ing of what we desire ? Does life give us 
all we wish, however passionately we wish 
it, and is Death any more likely to listen 
to the cry of our desires ? Of course we 
wish it^ wish it with a pathetic urgency 
which is too poignant to bear, and which 
the wise man bravely stifles. It would all 
be different if we knew. 

Lector : But does not science even, of 
late, hold out the promise of its probabil- 
ity ? — and the greatest poets and thinkers 
have always been convinced of its truth. 

ScRiPTOR : The promise of a proba- 
bility ! O my Lector, what a poor sub- 
stitute is that for a certainty ! And as 
for the great men you speak of, what does 
their ' instinctive ' assurance amount to 
but a strong sense of their own existence 



190 PROSE FANCIES 

at the moment of writing or speaking ? 
Does one of them anywhere assert im- 
mortality as 3. fact — a fact of which he 
has his own personal proof and knowledge 
— a scientific, not an imaginative, theo- 
logical fact? Arguments on the subject 
are naught. It is waste of time to read 
them ; unsupported by fact, they are one 
and all cowardly dreams, a horrible hypo- 
critical clutching at that, which their writ- 
ers have not the courage to forego. 

Lector : Yet may not a dream be of 
service to reality, my friend ? Is it not 
certain that people are all the better and 
all the happier for this dream, as you call 
it ? — for what seems to me this sustaining 
faith? 

ScRiPTOR : Happier ? Some people, 
perhaps, in a lazy, unworthy fashion. But 
'better'? Well, so long as we believed 
in ' eternal punishment ' no doubt people 
were sometimes terrified into ' goodness ' 
by the picture of that dread vista of tor- 
ment, as no doubt they were bribed into it 
by the companion picture of a green, un- 
bounded Paradise ; but, O my friend, what 
an unvv^orthy kind of goodness, the mere 



PROSE FANCIES 191 

mask of virtue ! And now that the Inferno 
has practically disappeared from our theol- 
ogy, the belief in eternal life simply means 
unlimited cakes and ale, for good and evil 
alike, for all eternity. How such a belief 
can be moralising I fail to understand. To 
my mind, indeed, far from being moralising 
this belief in immortality is responsible for 
no inconsiderable portion of the wrong and 
misery of the world. It is the baneful 
narcotic which has soothed the selfish and 
the slothful from the beginning. It is 
that unlimited credit which makes the 
bankrupt. It simply gives us all eternity 
to procrastinate in. Instead of manfully 
eating our peck of dirt here and now, we 
leave it and all such disagreeables to the 
hereafter. 

* He said, " I believe in Eternal Life," 
As he threw his life away — 

What need to hoard ? 

He could well afford 
To squander his mortal day. 
With Eternity his, what need to care ? — 
A sort of immortal millionaire.' 

Lector : I am glad to be reminded, 
Scriptor, that you are a poet, for the line 
of your argument had almost made me 



192 PROSE FANCIES 

forget it. One expects other views from 
a poet. 

ScRiPTOR : When, my dear Lector, will 
we get rid of the silly idea that the poet 
should give us only the ornamental view 
of life, and rock us to sleep, like babies, 
with pretty lullabies ? Is it not possible to 
make facts sing as well as fancies ? With 
all this beautiful world to sing of — for 
beautiful it is, however it be marred j with 
this wonderful life — and wonderful and 
sweet it is, though it is shot through with 
such bitter pain; with such certainties for 
his theme, we yet beg him to sing to us 
of shadows ! 

And you talk of ' faith.' ' Faith ' truly 
is what we want, but it is faith in the life 
here, not in the life hereafter. Faith in 
the life here ! Let our poets sing us that. 
And such as would deny it — I would 
hang them as enemies of society. 

Lector : But, at all events, to keep 
to our point — you at least hope for im- 
mortality. If Edison, say, were suddenly 
to discover it for us as a scientific cer- 
tainty, you would welcome the news ? 

ScRirxoR: Well, yes and no ! Have 



PROSE FANCIES 193 

you seen the ' penny ' phonographs in the 
Strand ? You should go and have a penny- 
worth of the mysteries of time and space ! 
How long will Edison's latest magic 
toy survive this popularisation, I wonder ? 
For a little moment it awakens the sense 
of wonder in the idly curious, who set the 
demon tube to their ears ; but if they 
make any remarks at all, it is of the 
cleverness of Mr. Edison, the probable 
profits of the invention — and not a word 
of the wonder of the world ! So it would 
be with the undiscovered country. I was 
blamed the other day as being cheaply 
smart because I said that if ' one traveller 
returned,' his resurrection would soon be 
as commonplace as the telephone, and that 
enterprising firms would be interviewing 
him as to the prospects of opening branch 
establishments in Hades. Yet it is a per- 
fectly serious, and I think true, remark ; 
for who that knows the modern man, with 
his small knowingness, and his utter in- 
capacity for reverence, would doubt that 
were Mr. Edison actually to be the 
Columbus of the Unseen, it would soon 
be as overrun with gaping tourists as 



194 PROSE FANCIES 

Switzerland, and that within a year rail- 
way companies would be advertising 
' Bank-holidays in Eternity ' ? 

No ! let us keep the Unseen — or, if it 
must be discovered, let the key thereof be 
given only to true-lovers and poets. 



PROSE FANCIES— XIX 

A SEAPORT IN THE MOON. 

NO ONE Is so hopelessly wrong 
about the stars as the astronomer, 
and I trust that you never pay any 
attention to his remarks on the moon. 
He knows as much about the moon as a 
coiffeur knows of the dreams of the fair 
lady whose beautiful neck he makes still 
more beautiful. There is but one opinion 
upon the moon — namely, our own. And 
if you think that science is thus wronged, 
reflect a moment upon what science makes 
of things near at hand. Love, it says, is 
merely a play of pistil and stamen, our 
most fascinating poetry and art is ' degen- 
eration,' and human life, generally speak- 
ing, is sufficiently explained by the ^carbon 
compounds' — God-a-mercy! If science 
makes such grotesque blunders about 
radiant matters right under its nose, how 
can one think of taking its opinion upon 
matters so remote as the stars — or even 

195 



196 PROSE FANCIES 

the moon, which is comparatively near at 
hand ? 

Science says that the moon is a dead 
world, a cosmic ship littered with the 
skeletons of its crew, and from which 
every rat of vitality has long since escaped. 
It is the ghost that rises from its tomb 
every night to haunt its faithless lover, 
the worldo It is a country of ancient 
silver mines, unworked for centuries. 
You may see the gaping mouths of 
the dark old shafts through your tele- 
scopes. You may even cee the rusting 
pit tackle, the ruinous engine-houses, and 
the idle pick and shovel. Or you may 
say that it is counterfeit silver, coined to 
take in the young fools who love to gaze 
upon it. It is, so to speak, a bad half-a- 
crown. 

As you will ! but I am of Endymion's 
belief — and no one was ever more inti- 
mate with the moon. For me the moon 
is a country of great seaports, whither all 
the ships of our dreams come home. 
From all quarters of the world, every day 
of the week, there are ships sailing to the 
moon. They are the ships that sail just 



PROSE FANCIES 197 

when and where you please. You take 
your passage on that condition. And it is 
ridiculous to think for what a trifle 
the captain will take you on so long a 
journey. If you want to come back, just 
to take an excursion and no more, just to 
take a lighted look at those coasts of rose 
and pearl, he will ask no more than a glass 
or two of bright wine — indeed, when the 
captain is very kind, a flower will take you 
there and back in no time ; if you want 
to stay whole days there, but still come 
back dreamy and strange, you may take a 
little dark root and smoke it 'in a silver 
pipe, or you may drink a little phial of 
poppy-juice, and thus you shall find the 
Land of Heart's Desire ; but if you are 
wise and would stay in that land forever, 
the terms are even easier — a little powder 
shaken into a phial of water, a little piece 
of lead no bigger than a pea and a farthing's 
worth of explosive fire, and thus also you 
are in the Land of Heart's Desire forever. 
I dreamed last night that I stood on the 
blustering windy wharf, and the dark ship 
was there. It was impatient, like all of 
us, to leave the world. Its funnels belched 



198 PROSE FANCIES 

black smoke, its engines throbbed against 
the quay Hke arms that were eager to 
strike and be done, and a bell was beating 
impatient summons to be gone. The dark 
captain stood ready on the bridge, and he 
looked into each of our faces as we passed 
on board. ' Is it for the long voyage ? * he 
said. 'Yes! the long voyage,' I said — 
and his stern eyes seemed to soften as I 
answered. 

At last we were all aboard, and in the 
twinkling of an eye were out of sight of 
land. Yet,once afloat, it seemed as though 
we should never reach our port in the 
moon — so it seemed to me as I lay awake 
in my little cabin, listening to the patient 
thud and throb of the great screws, beat- 
ing in the ship' side like a human heart. 

Talking with my fellow-voyagers, I was 
surprised to find that we were not all vol- 
unteers. Some in fact complained piti- 
fully. They had, they said, been going 
about their business a day or two before, 
and suddenly a mysterious captain had laid 
hold of them, and pressed them to sail this 
unknown sea. Thus, without a word of 
warning they had been compelled to leave 



PROSE FANCIES 199 

behind them all they held dear. This one 
felt was a little hard of the captain ; but those 
of us whose position was exactly the 
reverse, who had friends on the other side, 
all whose hopes indeed were invested there, 
were too selfishly expectant of port to be 
severe on the captain who was taking us 
thither. 

There were three friends I had especially 
set out to see : two young lovers who had 
emigrated to those colonies in the moon 
just after their marriage, and there was 
another. What a surprise it would be to 
all three, for I had written no letter to say 
I was coming. Indeed, it was just a sud- 
den impulse, the pistol flash of a long 
desire. 

I tried to imagine what the town would 
be like in which they were now living. I 
asked the captain, and he answered with a 
sad smile, that it would be just exactly as 
I cared to dream it. 

' Oh, well then,' I thought, ' I know 
what it will be like. There shall be a 
great restless, tossing estuary, with Atlantic 
winds forever ruffling the sails of busy 
ships, ships coming home with laughter, 



200 PROSE FANCIES 

ships leaving home with sad sea-gull cries 
of farewell. And the shaggy tossing water 
shall be bounded on either bank with high 
granite walls, and on one bank shall be a 
fretted spire soaring with a jangle of bells, 
from amid a tangle of masts, and under- 
neath the bells and the masts shall go 
streets rising up from the strand, streets 
full of faces, and sweet with the smell of 
tar and the sea. O, captain, will it be 
morning or night when we come to my 
city ? In the morning my city is like a 
sea-blown rose, in the night it is bright 
as a sailor's star. 

' If it be early morning, what shall I do ? 
I will run to the house in which my friends 
lie in happy sleep, never to be parted 
again, and kiss my hand to their shrouded 
window; and then I will run on and on 
till the city is behind and the sweetness of 
country lanes is about me, and I will 
gather flowers as I run, from sheer wan- 
tonness of joy, and then at last, flushed 
and breathless, I will stand beneath her 
window. I shall stand and listen, and I 
shall hear her breathing right through the 
heavy curtains and the hushed garden and 



PROSE FANCIES 201 

the sleeping house will bid me keep 
silence, but I shall cry a great cry up to 
the morning star, and say, " No, I will 
not keep silence. Mine is the voice she 
listens for in her sleep. She will wake 
again for no voice but mine. Dear one, 
awake, the morning of all mornings has 
come ! " ' 

As I write, the moon looks down at me 
like a Madonna from the great canvas of 
the sky. She seems beautiful with the 
beauty of all the eyes that have looked up 
at her, sad with all the tears of all those 
eyes ; like a silver bowl brimming with 
the tears of dead lovers she seems. Yes, 
there are seaports in the moon, there are 
ships to take us there. 



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